July 16, 2024

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Praise FOR INSTRUCTIONS

Startling and raw, Instructions for Banno runs, the poet writes, "to the edge of a heart. Mine." A formidable collection that braids history, memory, and tradition into a bittersweet inheritance, Bath explicitly pries apart female identity to liberate her own nuanced voice. The poet's interruption of her memory, her body, her narrative of family and ancestors, is mesmerizing and defiant. Instructions for Banno is an exquisite awakening. Aware of her own power and vulnerability, Bath declares, "A girl is a gun that may go off at any time."

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

"Kiran Bath's INSTRUCTIONS FOR BANNO is a profoundly moving work of prose, written for and near a vulnerable body in the surge and aftermath of violence. What is it like to run "to the edge of a heart. Mine."?  As Bath writes: "What is honour but the rope that comes for us all in the end." This is writing that had to be survived in order to become: writing.  Through ritual, performance, and syntax, this is a book that shatters the crystallization patterns that familial and sexual trauma bring. How does it do this?  Incantation: "I waited for Kali. I revived, I survived, I revive, I survive." I am honored to write in support of this extraordinary book and the many Bannos it contains.  Each Banno, each field note, each instruction, each attempt to write what could not be written before: make a pathway from creativity to survival. The last lines, when you reach them, will touch the middle of your heart, I hope.  As they touched mine."

Bhanu Kapil

The age old concerns of how to be part of a family, and also one’s own person, are given new life here in Kiran Bath’s delightful debut collection. These poems are at turns lush, defiant, modern and ancient, a lively and loving record reminding us that life is designed as much as it is inherited. “I save everything,” Bath writes, and, “I do not seek rebirth. I am accumulating.” These lines are a mere glimpse of the strong and sophisticated speakers whose voices we are fortunate enough to encounter in this daring debut.

Tarfia Faizullah

Kiran Bath’s poetics are conduit: through them we witness the archive, witness ourselves witnessing that archive, witness how our lives become prophecy for future generations, and as such the way we choose to live matters immeasurably. Instructions for Banno teems with wives, sisters, daughters, friends—“Bannos under the watch of other Bannos not watching.” Through these Bannos, Bath has produced an incredible work of art, one that generously cultivates intimacy through interconnected feminine lineages that are both multifaceted and too easily erased. Indeed, Bath’s defining talent is her tendency to write within and through complexities—evolving cultural philosophies, multifaceted heritages. In end-stopped poems sweeping across the page’s expanse, magnified further by field notes, Bath challenges the notion of document, and interrogates the author’s role in storytelling and in carrying forward a lineage. Just as “the poet interrupts,” so do Nikki, Bubbly, Deepu, Nirbhaya, whose dialogue with one another is as frank as their commentary that fraught identity marker: bride. I so admire these poems—how they innately value women’s agency and autonomy, even as Bath investigates how, despite our knowledge of our own shackles, we fall prey to structural inequity. Instructions for Banno awoke something ancestral, buried deep in my gut, so when Bath writes, “Imagine a non-linear lineage. / Imagine it.,” I have no choice but to dream.

Raena Shirali