The Daughter Industry

"Despite the gravity of this subject, The Daughter Industry is lovingly choreographed by Patel’s recognizable charm, humor, and playfulness as a writer—traits which their players embody as well. Moody Scorpios and fastidious Virgos abound in this book, and gender becomes both a marker of where you are in this place and time as well as a moving target. The cast gives us this rich gender discourse while going into happy baby pose."
—Muriel Leung, Electric Literature

"The Daughter Industry is also a yoga instructional, a sitcom for ghosts, a closet drama, an uncloseted queer burlesque, a swirling and shattered gallery of word art, and a point-by-point riposte to cisheteropatriarchy as it manifests in the global North and South alike."
—Christopher Spaide, Lit Hub
"The collection presents a three-act “yogachoroeopoemverseplay” in which the ghostly voices of girls and children rejected because of their gender rise in a chorus of grief and defiance."—CEvangeline Riddiford Graham, Poets & Writers Ten Questions

"The Daughter Industry is a fierce autopoetic in which cultural and sociopolitical scripts dance toward collision. Through a dazzling choral voice, Patel exposes the machinery built to vanish daughters and vanquish desire. Like an alchemist, Patel speculates, blends, and recomposes the elements until the truth arrives unruly, visionary, and gloriously singular in its force."
—Airea Matthews

"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."
—Daniel Borzutzky

"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."
—Rajiv Mohabir

"Poet Soham Patel joins the lineage of Shange, Lorde, and Anzaldúa 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."
—Brenda Shaughnessy

"Composed as a lyric narrative through seven characters, The Daughter Industry explores how gender is approached and reduced, articulating a choral voice in three acts: with short opener to begin, a prose poem set as a rush, a push of dense lyric. . . . Patel offers a blend of voice and voices, allowing each their own agency, their own space."
—rob mclennan