Instructions for Banno

Author: Kiran Bath

Publisher: Kelsey Street Press (2024)

In her debut poetry collection, Kiran Bath travels through the timelines and geographies of the women in her family to understand the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride (banno). Threading stories of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, and first generation daughters, she renders themes of subjugation, domestic violence, honor killings, and infanticide alongside unrequited love, sisterhood, motherhood, and devotion in cathartic form. The result is the set of instructions left for Banno, a diary that ruptures the institution of filial duty and embodies the tradition that survives it—an insistence for declaring our humanity.