Failures of Mirror Logic

Megan Fernandes interviews Kiran Bath about “Instructions for Banno.”

By Megan FernandesMarch 15, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

I KEPT RUNNING INTO Kiran Bath around Brooklyn.

First, at a reading at Hala Alyan’s house where, she later told me, laughing, I came across as intimidating (unfortunately, after surveying some folks about first impressions of me, this came in at 50 percent accurate).

Next, at the gym café. Upon seeing me, Kiran immediately contorted her body in half, shifting into a yoga asana, hands under her feet pads, hopping backward while explaining (albeit upside-down) a pose she had just tried in class. It should be noted that this occurred far from any actual exercise space and therefore looked utterly bizarre and endearing.

The last encounter was at a Yallaween party in Queens where Aisha Mirza was spinning. Kiran was dressed as J.Lo, sporting giant sunglasses and whipping her hair around, elbow-dancing on the sidewalk, surrounded by a circle of close friends. I, in an auburn wig and unrecognizable, tapped her shoulder, pulled off my Natasha Lyonne mane in one fell swoop, and grinned. She screamed. We laughed. And on that spot in front of the Deep End, I invited Kiran to a retreat of South Asian artists that was being held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). I’m not sure what possessed me to do so (we barely knew each other) except that being in her presence made everything livelier and more fragmented, stranger and more possible. The big moon was swinging. The neon-green flashing light on someone’s wrist kept the pulse of our conversation. The retreat was less than two weeks away, and I was sure she would not come as spontaneity ranks so low for us living in this city. But she did. And so began one of the fastest poet intimacies of my adult life.

During our time at MASS MoCA, we spent our days talking about art and family, and our nights sprawled out in a king-sized bed, talking about heartbreak and selfhood until there was nothing left to confess. From those conversations, I got a sense of the poet, the person behind the scenes of the poems in her lush and unsettling debut book of poetry, Instructions for Banno, published last July. The poet was dark, yes. Ruthlessly saucy. Unprecious about history and its harms. And extraordinarily (intimidatingly?) intelligent.

The poems in Instructions for Banno (“banno” means “bride” in Punjabi) are resurrections and reformations, demands for apologies, demands for intelligibility, demands for anyone who has ever failed at being a betrothed with that “false self-orientation.” In one poem, the speaker writes: “I tread the water of penalty. I seek the sinking that comes with inheritance,” mapping a psychosexual terrain of woman-as-chameleon. Chameleons must shift their presentation in order to survive, as the speakers of these poems do in a “failure of mirror logic.”

The book delves into the sex lives of our elders and swims in the sensual imaginary of milk, meat, boys, peacocks at rest, sweet and cold cats’ eyes, guesswork, and girl as less, girl as lesson. It’s hard not to get caught up in the marvelous internal rhythm of the prose poems, the expert pacing, and the kaleidoscopic, cinematic, and, yes, dreamy clips, quickly shifting like a broken projector over the course of a page. One could get swept along and miss the violence foaming around the language. But Kiran always draws us back to how violence conceals itself, and she does what can feel impossible when one is writing in and with an unarchived history of suffering, made peripheral by colonial and patriarchal forces. She does what Tavia Nyong’o argues for in his 2018 book Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, which is “to make sense of the paradoxical vibrance of a form of life endangered, or even erased, by efforts at documentation and representation […] a critical and fabulative archiving of a world that was ‘never meant to survive,’ as Audre Lorde memorably put it.” Instructions for Banno is an imaginative insistence, an ethical imagining of past lives and generations of women forced into various habits and contexts. Kiran deconstructs their stories from the forces entrapping them. And what do they do when they are free from those forces? Eat lunch. Sit on a beloved’s lap. Smoke a cigarette. Take their time in the bathroom. Ordinary human living. As one banno says: “Don’t pity me. Picture me resplendent.”

¤

MEGAN FERNANDES: What, if any, is the role of innocence in the book?

KIRAN BATH: It’s interesting. I think the book laments how manufactured innocence can be. And by innocence, I don’t mean the absence of fault, but rather a predefined condition around which patriarchal and cosmic rules are set. A nine-year-old girl is condemned to an honor killing if her purity is compromised in the eyes of a complete stranger (“How to be seen”). A banno’s best explanation for a life of injustice is paying for sins committed in a previous life (“Mediation transcript on metaphysics”). I find the value and relevance of innocence a highly charged concept.

In Instructions for Banno, you write, “To be bride is to be bridled.” Of course, to “bridle” means to show anger and resentment, and a horse bridle is a piece of equipment to direct the horse. How does the figure of the banno function within this language play of both submission and resistance? Is the banno an archetype, an ancestor, both the “I” and the “you” of the poems? How does she break character?

She’s all of the above! I had to be very deliberate about when to emphasize the monolith of banno—and this was most useful when demonstrating the propaganda of the ideal South Asian woman versus the cracking of that mold. I found the free verse in the “Poet Interrupts” sequences to be an ideal space to play with and, frankly, yell about the archetype, and the persona poems as the obvious forum for demonstrating the agency and hybridity of her lived experience.

The music, particularly the internal slant rhyme of the prose poems, is exceptional. The poetic energy is expertly paced and choreographed throughout, the rhymes falling and landing in pleasurable splashes, the syntax chopping up the streams of speaking, narrating, thinking aloud. Can you talk about internal rhythm and experimental prose poetry? Is internal rhythm a form of self-knowledge?

It is absolutely a form of self-knowledge. I’m still undecided as to whether internal rhythm is something imagined or channeled, and perhaps that distinction is meaningless? I’m also really interested in the flexibility of rhythm, how it can be invoked to convey romance, a sense of urgency, or an incantation. The internal rhythm and pacing are what give my prose poems a sense of direction. I think that “experimental poetry” sometimes can be incorrectly associated with chaotic or random choices in the writing or a lack of discipline. However, I find it’s the opposite. You have to work even harder to pull off the conscious choice to diverge from established form into alternate houses for the work. The rhythm is a compass I rarely stray from.

Banno feels both ancient and contemporary and also preoccupied with futurity. Through this simultaneity of temporalities, you’ve managed to protect your bannos from causal time and prevented the banno from the easy banishment to yesterday’s world. Can you talk about time and the book in any way that feels organic to you?

Your detection of safety for the bannos as a reader is so instructive. There is indeed a lot of time travel in the book. The persona poems are arranged nonchronologically across multiple generations of women to emphasize the sameness of the banno’s entrapment and the illusion of the so-called freedoms of our contemporary world. The book is also very preoccupied with deprogramming and existentialism, and in light of that, I felt compelled to speak to the observed symmetries and asymmetries of how time is experienced. Therefore, the futurity of unborn generations had to be considered, as well as the idea of nonlinear lineages and nonlinear inheritance.

You write: “I started living alone to develop a formula,” and later, “I considered the fossils of unrequited pleasure.” Formulas and fossils, field notes and pathologies, logics and instructions. The language of anthropology and archaeology attempts to govern what cannot be governed: loneliness, a woman’s body, a lost mother, “sinfulness” without remorse. Why did you choose to write between these different registers of disciplinarity and language?

This might seem like an odd analogy, but I think about how a student has to show the proof of work in answering math problems. The solution can’t be relied upon without demonstrating the reasoning. In the same way, it felt important to make the text very active and the speaker very self-aware in what was being excavated, explored, remembered, imagined, and gleaned in pursuit of asking questions of the bannos and circling some of the possible answers. Without “showing” that work, I think the book would have felt like an extended exercise of armchair philosophizing.

One of the poems speaks to the difference between “rebirth” and “accumulation,” preferring the second. And in another poem, you write that the legacy of banno is to “suffer gracefully for karmic returns.” I loved these moments in the poems. There is nothing noble or romantic about the suffering of the banno. Her accumulation of self is more important than the transformation of her pain into something cosmic or spiritual. One of the dangers (we might even say a colonial danger) of high lyricism is this over-romanticizing, and I’m wondering how your commitment to a more experimental poetry practice has also been a political project of desentimentalizing pain.

I think poetry as a medium is inherently romantic. The South Asian literature and art I grew up with was also inherently romantic. With these two starting points, I found my experimental practice to be the only way that I could counteract those leanings and break into very matter-of-fact discussions of pain and ordinary violence. Notwithstanding the directedness, there are still various moments of lush and romantic imagery. In these cases, the romanticizing is humanizing and is essential to not casting banno as a victim. There is beauty and richness in her experience that should see the light as much as pain and violence does.

This is a very open-ended question, but it is something I think about all the time when I read collections: Why did you begin where you began and why did you end where you ended? What was gained? What was lost?

I began the collection with “How to return,” which is the poem that holds a dream-space refuge for me. It felt correct to begin in a paradise for banno and work backward from there to the more difficult and devastating experiences that lead us to the longing. Ending with a ghazal that echoes a chorale of warning and surrender from bannos felt like the appropriate ribbon to seal the collection. I lost the urge to include every banno I could think of, so many were missed. I gained a deep trust of my poetics and their ability to bring the unknowable to light.

What does the afterlife of the first book look like?

To be very candid, I knew that if this first book was the only piece of art I ever managed to put out into the world, I’d be at peace with that. I think that’s a very precious knowing that one can give themselves. It was heavy, and it was necessary, and I saw nothing beyond it at the time. And now, a surprising thing has happened; with the bannos out in the ether, I feel like I’m in a springtime of creation again. I feel how necessary art and language are to my core, my wiring. Having explored the larger and more looming macro-conscience of my feminist and ancestral lineage, I feel drawn to the microcosm of the interior. I feel free to explore what I once regarded as childish or self-indulgent: romantic failure, erotic desire, acts of betrayal, sentiments of envy and vanity. I am flirting with these themes in two different projects I’m at work on. I am unburdening banno from an entire history and asking her to tell me about everyday romance, everyday rejection.

Where does romance or romanticizing belong?

I have a very particular relationship to romanticizing. I think it’s a more useful force than we give it credit for. Sometimes it’s a simple self-soothing tactic, like buying flowers for yourself, or it’s a way to beautify the imperfect, like gold leaf in the wabi-sabi art form. But its greatness, for me at least, is how it can be a reminder of the richness of existing. There are certain textures of our reality that are only accessible with a romantic lens. I’ll never refuse to acknowledge the beauty in something side-by-side with its devastation. I don’t have to; there’s room for both. Maybe the moon is the greatest advocate for that. I also feel like, as I grow older, my cynicism can trample my optimism, but it can never repel my impulse for romance. Because what can’t be forced can’t be contrived. I think when you’re forcing it is when it doesn’t belong. Or when it’s being used to obfuscate or diminish the truth of something, and then it not only doesn’t belong but also cheapens its own utility. One question I’ve been thinking about a lot is, is it romance’s job to be responsible? What does “cautious romance” look like? Is that an oxymoron or is it possible?

¤

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, Winter Tangerine, and Brooklyn Poets. Bath is a Kundiman fellow and a Tin House alumna. Her work has been short-listed for the Peach Gold in Poetry and the Jake Adam York Prize, long-listed for the Pamet River Prize, and twice nominated for The Best of the Net. Bath’s poems appear in wildness, The Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and other decorated journals. Instructions For Banno (2024) is Bath’s debut collection of poetry with Kelsey Street Press.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Kiran Bath by Adrien Moens.