Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry—book launch
with Dawn Lundy Martin and special guests
The Daughter Industry:
A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players
We are excited to welcome Soham Patel as they launch their new collection (Nightboat), a genre-defying blend of poetry, performance, and political awakening that confronts the transnational crisis of sex-selective elimination.
“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
In a prismatic meditation on survival, Patel assembles a chorus of seven voices to sing songs of resistance and queer desire. Patel transforms medical language, pop culture fragments, and dream sequences into an unflinching examination of what it means to exist in a world that doesn’t want you. From yoga halls to ultrasound clinics, from Bollywood dance routines to ghost stories, Patel maps the daughter industry with her signature wit, prosody, and clear-sighted documentation of erased histories.
About the authors
Soham Patel is the author of The Daughter Industry (Nightboat, 2026), as well as all one in the end/water— (2022), ever really hear it (2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (2018). They live in Blacksburg, Virginia where they teach at the MFA at Virginia Tech.
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
More Praise
“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