The Daughter Industry:

In The Daughter Industry, Soham Patel constructs a poetics of survival where each page feels like a laboratory. Theatrical forms, documentary forms, lipograms, redactions, concrete and visual forms, yogic forms: these experimental ways of creating serve as containers for those whose bodies circulate at the deadly intersection of technology, culture, politics, and biology. That there is pleasure in the sounds and rhythms and voices and shapes of this book is a testament to Patel’s vision.

Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry scorches as it provokes the reader into considering the effects and impacts of the continued erasure of girls, women, and the nonbinary actors in this seven-part choreopoem. The fearlessly brown voices claim space to counter cisheteropatriarchal logics through the dazzlement of voice and the myriad forms erupting from this necessary, timely, essential book.

Poet Soham Patel joins the lineage of Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Shange in creating and naming a new form for womanist truth-telling. And like Zami, Borderlands, or For Colored Girls…this book cuts a new shape, ever-shifting. The Daughter Industry is funny, and swooningly beautiful to read aloud. It’s always surprising—hot, messy, breathing, erotic, laughing/sobbing—fully and fiercely alive in brilliant, heartbreaking realness.