Soham Patel, The Daughter Industry

 

SAI TELLS A GHOST STORY
(while practicing some version of surya namaskar aka sun salutations) 

 

One morning in late 2010 I looked out my apartment window in Pitts-
burgh where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts,
and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of
Friendship. 

I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live
with—we would walk around and routinely meet the people. 

That early morning and only that morning, I thought I saw or I saw out
the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four or five-year-old
brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. 

How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and
it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding
alone.

The latest from Virginia-based British-born poet Soham Patel is The DaughterIndustry (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), a title that follows an array of publications including at least four chapbooks, as well as the full-length collections to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018) and ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize [see my review of these two here], and all one in the end/water— (Delete Press, 2022) [see my review of such here].

Composed as a lyric narrative through seven characters, The Daughter Industry explores how gender, specifically female and non-binary, 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. As the piece “IN MY DOTTED SUIT AND NO DUPATTA” begins: “On one of the days I found my gender I was in my white dotted orange Punjabi suit sans dupatta I always went sans dupatta because a dean at the arts college told me I had to wear the dupatta always while working and when I asked him why he said to me with smiling eyes in his third language and my first and only fluent one ‘So you always look like a pretty girl!’ [.]” Writing a kind of sequential accumulation, Patel offers a blend of voice and voices, allowing each their own agency, their own space, across an articulation of (as Rajiv Mohabir offers in their back cover quote) “the continued erasure of girls, women, and the nonbinary actors in this seven-part choreopoem,” weaving in and around each other as little bricks of text, all of which combine to form this larger book-length pattern.

Patel cuts a shape of truth, utilizing blocks of text and visual bends as flourish; setting the stage, as one might see this work performed quite easily in a theatrical setting. “one becomes female for the purposes of reproduction,” begins the poem “CLOWNFISH ALL BORN MALE AND THEN THE DOMINANT,” “yellow-bellied water snake gives birth to litters w/out // any men anyway some cardinals like ppl all bright red // fellas and the pale of lady’s gray moods when pesticide // turns common reed frog males into fully functioning fe- // males human baby born→dr. looks for a penis→she // can’t find one the human baby is killed [.]”

Brandi Bird, Pitiful

 

HUNGER AS FIRE SEASON

I have wet eyes & want so badly to be loved a wall between
contrasts orange & blue sun & sky keep me comfortable
& don’t ask questions blush red girlish in light a choice to
stay in a house burning fire season white pills caught in my
throat I am a woman maybe dissolve fast currents no wisdom
just chemicals the flames say nothing I say nothing back try to
speak to flood no sound except thunder no lightning strikes
but new heat surrounds me fires distance made closer

The second full-length collection from Surrey, British Columbia-based poet Brandi Bird [reading in Ottawa this weekend as part of VERSeFest; see their 2023 “12 or 20 questions” interview here], following The All + Flesh (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2023), is Pitiful (Anansi, 2026), a collection composed as a singular and unsectioned assemblage of first-person lyric narratives and meditations around family story and history, and physical and emotional health, amid threads of pop culture stitched in for good measure. As Bird writes in the acknowledgments at the back of the collection: “Pitiful’s entire skeleton was written in only two delirious months. For the first time in my writing career, the poems that filled out and arose from me were unconcerned with anyone’s approval or understanding but my own. This method of writing feels dangerous to me. I felt and still feel immense responsibility to my community. But I’ve decided to trust myself and my desire. I’ve chosen to allow these poems to form the flesh, gross and imperfect shape of feeling.” They go on to offer: “I write in conversation with history, theory, pop-culture, and other writers and orators through time. Pitiful is a form of relationality done with the dirt inside me. Everything and everyone is alive.” Bird’s opening salvo is the poem “AUTOBIORAPHY,” a poem that sets the foundation for the collection: “This is the beginning of what’s certain. // Fullness is inevitability. No way out // of this pit where the sun shatters // into shards,” the poem begins, “tongued between feeds.” As the poem continues, further on: “To be sick // in this way is to reject without recourse. Orbit // the sun in a body that is // just a body.”

There is an open vulnerability to the poems that make up Pitiful, offering both process and declaration of meditative threads, whether musing on past events or extended hospital stays. “too much // of a good thing in bad times // means my father has // a story.” Bird writes, as part of the ebb and flow of the extended lyric “MAGICAL THINKING.” “tells me // to never eat rabbit // even if I’m lost // with nothing but tree bark // & snow.” Bird writes of psych wards and family stories, pop culture notes referencing Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Degrassi, threading process notes on holding and being and collecting the self, how one gets there from here; through the swirls of surrounding articulate and inarticulate chaos. “Time / is still so cruel to children.” Bird writes, as part of “CONTINUUM.” “I grow & grow / & never get closer to my beginning.”

Lesle Lewis, John’s Table: poems

 

Lake

Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grows up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

The latest from Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany’s recently-founded publishing enterprise, Piżama Press, “an independent press dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal,” is John’s Table: poems (2026) by American poet Lesle Lewis. Self-described as a poet who “lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees,” Lewis is the author of five prior full-length poetry collections: Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and Rainy Days on the Farm (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2020), winner of The Ottoline Prize [see my review of such here]. Lewis, therefore, is not merely an experienced writer, but one who moves with the quiet confidence of a master, attending the intimate, the small, almost working a tone and tenor, a slow unfolding of a dense and lyric narrative, comparable to the prose details of American writer and translator Lydia Davis. “I’m always working.” begins the poem “Braver,” “I should pause more often. // But to think about not sleeping is not to sleep. // And sleeping takes too long.”

Each poem throughout Lewis’ John’s Table hold single-word titles, hinting at the precision to come, despite whatever broad sweeps and strokes lines might take; each poem simultaneously a kind of moment, singularly caught, as well as a meditation on and around the poem’s subject, much of which is offered through those single-word titles. “I ask myself to give myself.” Lewis writes, to close the poem “Need.” “My intention is to work but the work has no intention. // You photograph the photograph and then photoshop it. // You go to the paint store, the drug store, the cannabis dispensary and buy what you need.” Her poems revel in what appear to be small motions that hold turns and twists and turns, accumulating lines that offer straight lines of narrative but somehow bend and dodge as they continue. There is such incredible density and lightness, such nimble patter within the short spaces of these poems. The graceful assemblage of John’s Table offer sleek poems that defy expectation, articulating a book-length suite of fleeting moments of mortality (a thread throughout that begins to form around illness and the body, however subtle), all of which she holds in conceptual space; fleeting moments, all the more sweet for their brevity.

Pioneers

I’m sorry that I can’t give you more goodness.

The little I have, I need to keep for myself.

And I still live in this situation of my body.

The horizon stretches across all the body.

The solar panels are in their upright winter position.

The red pipe cleaner, our central theme, the other pipe cleaners wrap around.

Pieces of the old truths in the new spiritual lands are tree stumps around the cabins of the pioneers.