In The Distance Between Braids, Dr Paromita Patranobish charts the intimate terrain of girlhood with remarkable precision and emotional intelligence. Moving from early childhood to young adulthood, these poems map the psychological, cultural, and bodily transitions expected of girls in patriarchal spaces, particularly within the contained geography of small-town India.
This collection interrogates the subtle, systemic, and structural ways in which girlhood is shaped: through silence, surveillance, hunger, achievement, familial duty, and unspoken longing. With a language grounded in clarity and restraint, the poems foreground the domestic as political, the body as archive, and memory as an act of resistance.
Unsettling and deeply humane, The Distance Between Braids bears witness to what is inherited, enforced, undone, and reclaimed. It will resonate with readers who recognise girlhood not as nostalgia, but as a formative and ongoing negotiation with the self.
The experiences, reflections, voices, and sentiments in the poems that comprise The Distance Between Braids, date back to a neurodivergent early childhood, the difficult years of adolescence and young adulthood, the complex, troubling, turbulent, and exhilarating phenomenology of girlhood where the figures of paradox and contradiction determine every possibility, encounter and experience.
The title is a reference to the often heavy-handed and coercive ways in which the puzzling, measured, restrictive territory of norms, expectations, and stereotypes is introduced to girls, in the guise of discipline, obligation, values, and even love. The “braids” signify compulsory regimes often enacted on the female body as a site of control– of beauty, femininity, order and propriety. The wordplay and cover image introduce the resistance of creative and intellectual ambiguity– a braided bread– which also speaks of the collection’s primary focus: how norms are entwined deeply with emotion, embodiment, and affect.
The precise symbolic and symptomatic distance between braids doesn’t just impose restrictive, even impossible standards of body and behavior on women, for many, it translates into alienation from families, a perennial hunger for love and nurture that we discover can be conditional, and sometimes elusive.
And so, many of these poems– “Teacup From the Year I Almost Died”, “Fantasies of Starvation”, “The Lunchbox”, and “The Brown Ring Test”, among others– are about developing a severe eating disorder in my mid to late teens, and the trauma that underlies survival, threatens to invade one’s life, and gradually emerges, through patience, healing, and time, to be a rich reservoir of insights, an archive of self and society. Poems like “Small Town Beauty Parlour” and “School Assembly” evince how the subjective landscape of memory and experience is not divorced from the cultural and social landscapes within which disorders are formed, silenced, rejected, accepted, diagnosed, cured, reclaimed and narrativized.
The I, the she, in these poems is also a we. The settings and themes, though based in lived experience, are neither topical nor provincial but ask questions and venture provocations that are wider in scope and ambition.
On the author
Dr. Paromita Patranobish’s work focuses on the intellectual history of the body in modernity, and the conceptual and aesthetic links between embodiment and ecology. She is currently Assistant Professor of English, Mount Carmel College, Bangalore, where she teaches UG and PG courses, along with curating, designing, and teaching Certificate Credit research courses on Environmental Humanities, Critical Plant Studies, British Modernism, Visual Culture, and Postmodern Theory.
She is also passionate about curriculum design with a focus on innovative pedagogies, especially those that integrate performing and creative arts into classroom learning, and faculty development initiatives, and is currently part of the core team at the Centre for Learning, Development and Transformation (CLDT), and Department of Holistic Education, Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She loves working with the youth, has a penchant for public speaking and dramatics, and is serving as the Faculty Vice President for the Mount Carmel College Toastmasters Club (affiliated to TM International) and the Mount Carmel College Dramatics Association.
Dr. Patranobish has previously worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Delhi University, Shiv Nadar University, and Ambedkar University Delhi, where she designed and taught undergraduate and Postgraduate Courses on Gender Studies, Postmodernism, 19th Century Anglophone literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and Postcolonial Literatures. She writes and researches on topics at the intersection of gender, embodiment, environmental humanities, disability and neurodivergence, and nonhuman ecologies. Her doctoral thesis looked at disembodiment and spectrality in Virginia Woolf’s writing, and she is currently working on a monograph on waste and environmental toxicity in South Asian speculative writing and visual culture. Her academic articles have been published in Studies in Travel Writing (Taylor and Francis, 2019), SFRA Review (April 2023), Journal of Posthumanism (Transnational Press, 2023), Hakara Bilingual (2021), Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness (Routledge, August 2023), Global Journal of Animal Law (2024), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Taylor and Francis, 2024) Science Fiction Studies, (DePauw University, August 2024), Economic and Political Weekly (October, 2024) South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (October 2025), Anglia (July 2025), and Ecocene (2026).
She has received the 2026 Viksit Bharat Academic Excellence Award and the IMRF International Distinguished Public Service Medal For Educational Excellence Award 2025 from the IMRF Institution of Higher Education Research, India.
She also works as a freelance writer and her creative nonfiction, and book and art reviews have been published in Hakara Bilingual, The Bombay Review, Gulmohar Quarterly, Scroll, Cafe Dissensus, Stir World, The Brazen Collective, The Chakkar: An Indian Arts Review, and The Assam Tribune, among other publications. Her debut book of poetry The Distance Between Braids was published in 2025.
Product details
- ASIN : B0G4B3FMB3
- Publisher : Notion Press
- Publication date : 27 November 2025
- Language : English
- ISBN-13 : 979-8901761120
- Country of Origin : India
- Importer : Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd., 7/22, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi – 110002 INDIA, Email – customercare@atlanticbooks.com, Ph – 011-47320500
- Best Sellers Rank: #77 in Asian Literature (11/2/26)
