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 [.]”

Soham Patel, all one in the end—/water

 

That September when I first saw Lake Michigan, I wanted it to be the sea. Inhales and I would pretend I could taste salt from the air in my nose.

In the many months hundreds of articles twenty pounds three books all the injury and essays mouthfuls and loves and songs there were births and murders and deaths disasters storms and protests—and some semblance of home now every day when I see this lake.

Like that cocooning settle downhill into Manitou Springs in Colorado—closer to Pikes Peak’s white cap of snow and closer to my apartment, another threshold, so far away from the megachurch and from the military bases where I worked—or Bloomfield into Friendship neighborhood in Pittsburgh where the red house brick red house line the avenue to school. (“ON LAKE MICHIGAN”)

I’ve been eager to see further work from Soham Patel, rewarded this past week through the publication of her third full-length collection all one in the end—/water (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2023) [see my review of her first two full-length collections here]. one in the end—/water is a collection that is, in part, set as an intimate and book-length response via lyric to an array of poets working a blend of lyric, deep attention and ecological concern, including Lorine Niedecker, Brenda Iijima, Matthew Olzmann, Maggie Nelson, Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo V. Wilson. The title of the collection, for example, is directly borrowed from Niedecker’s poem “Paean to Place.” Blending lyric, line-breaks and prose poems, Patel’s is a lyric attending the very consideration of being, and being present, and the variety of perspectives and observations provide multiple directions upon the same sense of attending those moments. “Debris left standing is dead and so won’t be cut down for the humans’ safety so the power company says accordingly a fear I now hate but have conditions towards each tree from the middle to the end of our easement where I warranty me to learn all we can about this here rooted lands we’ve just moved in.” (“EXACTNESS COMES WITH WIND GUSTS”).

Patel writes colours and waves and lights across the ether. Writing on place names and ancestors, rain and what it uncovers, these are poems around a singular sense of geography that just as much explore how writing is thought and composed. As part of the poem “ON LAKE MICHIGAN,” she writes: “Matthew’s poems about shipwrecks in the great lakes lists fish and it all makes me so thirsty.” This is clearly a book composed in conversation, and in response, and there is something startling in this approach centred in a poetics of Niedecker and Iijima (the book is dedicated to Iijima), of space and rock and ecological concerns. Something startling, I suppose, in how clear-minded the poems read, amid, or even through, such polyvocabulary. It is interesting to think, as well, of this collection, as Patel offers in a note at the end of the collection, as “reassemblages from the previously published chapbooks,” blending previously-published material into an entirely coherent book-length form. There is such deep, abiding care through her attention. “Once I found a shiny layered rock on // Brighton Beach in the sand,” she writes, as part of “LISTEN IT’S MY DAY OFF,” “All over the darkness is real though // And oil fueled the plane not a boat [.]”

LIKE SNOW IN THE SUN I WANT TO S(T)AY. Opaque and at arm’s length with screens and the satellites, how this new word we learned, beautiful, is so. We are a dangerous thing, candles uttering against trees. We are dismantling from within under&uncommon and yet here to illuminate or else we’ll correct or uncover. Our light awaits warm and burn. It means renewal.

 

Soham Patel, to afar from afar and ever really hear it

This is to inform you:

Where you are going.  To offspring your own place

for the compass needle to point—make your own

magnetisms.  Only movement generates equations.

The push and the pull.  You carry a globe around:

furniture.  Used to reference, instruct, daydream,

decorate.   Ecliptic obliquities solve some loss.

Trace the figure eight.  Follow the way the analemma

draws the path the sun makes in the sky. Memorize

the Equation-of Time:      in the Northern Hemisphere if you

see the sun’s position is more east than where the dial on your

watch says it would be, the Equation-of-Time is negative—

the clock is behind the sun—if the sun is more west, the

Equation-of-Time is positive—the clock is in front of the

sun.  it will tell you what month.  It shows us the sun’s

declination for every day in the year.  You can sit still

feel the hours turn.

Georgia-based poet and editor Soham Patel’s managed two full-length poetry collections last year, including her debut, to afar from afar (CCM/Writ Large Press, 2018), and ever really hear it (Boulder CO: Subito Press, 2018), on the heels of four chapbooks, including and nevermind the storm and New Weather Drafts (both from Portable Press @Yo-Yo Labs) and Riva: A Chapter (kitchen-shy press). I do find it curious that neither collection includes an author biography, a rarity for poetry titles, let alone two by the same author, which might lead one to suspect this might be an author preference, allowing the work to speak without interference.

The book is built in sections: the seven poem “This is to inform you:” (with all poems sharing that title), the ten poem “On an other note:” (with all poems sharing that title), the triptych “smoke prelude – for now,” “in    airplane” and “to hear it and forget,” to the ten poem “Mixed with always”: (with all poems sharing that title) and the final poem in the collection, the single page “Hello, Ghost,” a poem that reverberates through the collection as a whole:

Hello, Ghost

As you trace your finger over

the globe your uncle gave you

the year you were born,

you remember how he used

to call it your baby earth.

It has raised and indented

relief. Your finger trembles

when you spin it fast. Fast

like the metals spinning

past the mantle at the core.

But on this 12” replica

of where we are—with its

white-like-parchment antique

ocean—only synthetic resins

and textile fibers can reside.

You remove a line of dust.

Rolling fingerwide waves.

Recall this isn’t like those

go-where-your-finger-lands

when-the-spinning-stops

destiny kind of games.

This is for remembering

the dust trail you’re always

leaving behind and the one

you aim at errantly

like a bewildered scout.

If language can only offer

a reduction of things—

why is it years

later when you notice

it still says Ceylon, you say

nothing and keep spinning?

The poems in to afar from afar are composed as extended, linked suites, each poem connecting to the prior, and speak to attention, attentiveness and distraction. The poems speak of, against and to the distances, from geography and home to those that may have been left behind. How does one bridge such enormous gaps? There is something fundamental about how Patel writes about and around being, and the creation and self-creation that battles expectation, as well as how that being interacts with the world. She writes intimately, it would seem, of being so very far away from home. As she writes in the first section of “This is to inform you:” poems: “How to make a good husband. / How to make a good wife. How / to make all the children obey / right. To make a house hold run. ///// Flames are the place from which you came.” There is such a deep and abiding wisdom to her lyrics and prose poems, one that seeks to navigate the world and be open to all its charms and difficulties. The kind of poems that, to paraphrase Don McKay, any bird would trust to land upon.

Winner of the 2017 Subito Prize, ever really hear it is another collection constructed as an extended lyric suite, one that is built out of sentences, prose poems and incredible lyric precision. As she writes:

You walk into a room full of forgiving. Both sable and embryonic in what it knows—a room can know something clearly when the ceiling is all glazed and glitter. A sandy sort of silvergold. Pink trimmings and paint chips. I cannot speak these narratives into being. You just have to pay attention. Whatever you can afford. Listen to the same song in different volumes. There are always noises traveling in through spaces between windows and walls.

A lyric is a way of saying in some other language. Dust is nothing but skin shedding and sweep and swipe all you want it always comes back. Hands push into other hands so know breath has a music all its own—know that to have been named after a breath is one thing that can keep the people breathing. After our return: remembrance—after remembrance: you draw the curtains. I draw a bath.

It would be interesting to know which collection was composed first, although it might not entirely matter, both titles circling each other’s orbit (akin to a binary star, perhaps), emerging almost as an unbound dos-à-dos. The parlance of Patel’s poems in ever really hear it really do feel meant to be heard aloud; her lines crackle and bounce, such as the poem “juke :,” that includes: “Gullah // came through the jukebox. / Singing. After rhymes continued. / Came loud so no forgetting now / come the grinding, come the high.” The way her poems are constructed, often title-less (utilizing the first line to indicate poems in the table of contents) is reminiscent, slightly, of the work of Kate Greenstreet, in that the poems, while they might exist as singular units or smaller groupings, they really are meant to exist in this book-length form, surviving impossibly in the wild and held together by an intricate series and sequence of threads, cadences and accumulations.

These really are a remarkable pair of poetry titles, and can be read together or apart, equally (although I would recommend both, if such a thing is possible). If to afar from afar wrote of distances and ghosts, ever really hear it exists in more immediate spaces, exploring a deep intimacy around listening, hearing and other tactile responses, as well as what could be a short excerpt that might be seen as relating to the lack of an author biography (although, admittedly, that might be me reaching for a connection that might not exist): “For the record to be a hit, / it also has to be disposable. / I have no bibliography.” If to afar from afar is a book of away, ever really hear it is a book of where she is, and is making her home. Her poems explore spaces, places and relationships, even if that relationship is but with the blank page.

I keep a leaf in this notebook. She gave it to me. In every city, morning is the same: sun and something warm to drink. A king has been born in a tupelo but queens in the mid-east keep all land full of grace. In Santa Fe, a stranger gave me a necklace—in Chicago, a kiss. Driving too late one night in Summit County the headlights weren’t bright enough to move a moose off the road—she looked up and looked me in the eyes and she grinned back. Hear vagrant harmony best when the music is turned up: all the way up to eleven if you will. What have you ever done but wondered when you could go home. Brown flares warn dancers not to step on feet but just remember every suit is sequined. I wrote down what I couldn’t say. Each word has been lifted from a book. Before I get back on the bus, a woman at the filling station asks me where I am from. I pretend I can’t hear her. Dark shades, white belt, stowed drams, in the pocket: rolling papers and a flinted lighter, practiced answers for interviews, comb, dust cloth, rose water, corrugated map of the Americas.