This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Soham Patel, whose poetry collection The Daughter Industry was published last week by Nightboat Books. 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. “What is it I am asking of you?” asks a ghost named Suvali. “To know of the daughter aversion.” Another ghost, Sai, pays tribute to the joyful alternatives of self-discovery and dance parties: “oh I miss those bright femme shiny short mod go-go frocks.” On Literary Hub, Christopher Spaide called the book “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.” Daniel Borzutzky, meanwhile, praised Patel’s genre-defying forms as “containers for those whose bodies circulate at the deadly intersection of technology, culture, politics, and biology.” Soham Patel is the author of the poetry collections all one in the end/water— (Delete Press, 2022), ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018). Patel lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where they teach in the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Tech.
Soham Patel, author of The Daughter Industry.
1. How long did it take you to write The Daughter Industry?
A little over fifteen years. In early days, it was a collection of poems, then it adapted elements of sound and video art. One iteration became my dissertation, one’s a choreopoem. It’s been an unpublished chapbook and a manuscript that did not win countless book contests. The Daughter Industry is also a play that’s been read a couple of times on Zoom by a chorus of friends, poets, actors, dramaturgs, and dancers. In truth, I am still writing The Daughter Industry and likely won’t stop.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Trusting what I needed to cut from the amassed heaps of material I just listed above. As a book, The Daughter Industry had to be concise and clear to become a well-made object you’d want to hold. That kind of discipline does not come naturally to a project that kept shapeshifting for so long. Everyone at Nightboat helped me find it.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Wherever, whenever. Work, family life, and the impossible everything of our current moment all make my schedule unpredictable, so I don’t have a devoted writing ritual right now. I draft multiple projects at once, so writing is a constant by way of research, experience, and storing scraps of language in my slipping memory, or in notebooks, or a Word document on my laptop, or somewhere in my cell phone for later use.
4. What are you reading right now?
Fence submissions for Issue 44 and the Issue 43 proofs. I am eager for folx to read the translation section compiled there. The plays Kevin Killian and David Brazil collected in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, most recently Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1977 play Réveillé dans la Brume. I love how the text imagines varied audio, light, and projection technology as Cha captures the particularities present in that interstice between dawn and day. Parul Sehgal’s Art of Nonfiction No. 14 interview with Sarah Schulman in the Spring 2026 issue of the Paris Review. Sehgal’s inquiries are always so comprehensive, and here they get Schulman talking in so many tones about, among other things, lesbian anarchy in the eighties, the book tour as activism, and the contradictions intrinsically present in community groups while also telling funny stories about her writing life. I just got Monica Ferrell’s new book, The Future (Four Way Books, 2026), and read the last poem, “I Found It,” which makes me very excited to read the whole thing. And I just finished my student’s MFA thesis draft that weaves Kashmiri folklore and multigenerational Partition narratives. It’s astounding.
5. Which poet, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Reetika Vazirani’s poetry deserves wider recognition. Her life and death eclipse the poetry, which is a loss. What she did with form and diasporic voice was precise, innovative, and underexamined. The few poems we have deserve much more serious conversation, especially in our moment’s deep need for planetary health and domestic harmony.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fatigue.
7. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the poems in this collection?
I fell off my bike when I was a kid trying to pop a wheelie over a sidewalk curb. It was a summer day, and I didn’t have school. My jeans shredded from the concrete over my bleeding knee. A woman saw me from the window and came out of her house. I have a memory of her eyes searching my face trying to figure me out, as if I was an alien even though I lived up the road in our small town with my mom and dad and sister. At the time, we were the only nonwhite family there. She finally said, “Oh you must be the Patel boy,” and I said yes. Then she led me into her house with her hand on my shoulder. I remember wearing a red polo shirt, and she cleaned me up and fed me milk and cookies that were, I am sure, the Girl Scout cookies my sister probably sold her earlier that year.
8. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
Attention to the asana sequence in a common hatha yoga session’s movements through a beginning, middle, and end. Each act needed to take about same amount of time to read aloud, and I wanted each of the seven players to have roughly the same number of lines. Another balancing act was to include the same number of visual poems in each section. Every section begins with one of Sai’s monologues. And, of course, the three-act structure offered an organizing strategy. The poems in Act I ground the book’s questions, Act II metabolizes them, and Act III points to resolutions or acknowledges the impossibility of any given the book’s curiosities about the gender binary. And then I did what I’ve done with all three of my previous books, which is to put the last poem I wrote at the start. For this book, it was actually two poems.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Daughter Industry?
The paintings of Pushpa Kumari, children’s toy commercials aired on U.S. cable channels circa the 1980s, Isabella Rosellini’s Green Porno, various dance techniques and traditions, Betye Saar’s assemblages, Prune Nourry’s installations, the blockbuster movie E.T., and popular music are just a few.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird. Thank you Anne Lamott and Pantheon.
