A Homecoming: Instructions for Banno

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.

Kiran Bath is a writer and lawyer based in New York. She has received fellowships, residencies and support from Poets House, the Vermont Studio Center and Brooklyn Poets. Kiran is a Kundiman fellow and a Tin House alumnus. Her work has been shortlisted for the Peach Gold in Poetry and the Jake Adam York Prize, and longlisted for…