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The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players
A genre-defying blend of poetry, performance, and political awakening that confronts the transnational crisis of sex-selective elimination.
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 12, 2026
The Daughter Industry's central preoccupation is the gendercide of girls — sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and the structural devaluing of daughters in patriarchal societies, with India as a primary (but not exclusive) site. The poem "Study (I)" is essentially an erasure and repurposing of Amartya Sen's famous 1990 essay "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing."
Being staged as a "play" the characters Sajani, Suvali, Sasmita, Shasha/Sheetal, Sarah, Sidhangana are "all unborn ghosts you know". These are the missing daughters conjured as spectral performers. Some of these deaths are deeply disturbing: "a cat trotted down the hospital hall with a female fetus dangling from her mouth." Some are medicalized into whispers folded (literally) in half across the Page: (Note: I had to look these up but these drugs are "uterotonic agents and prostaglandins used in obstetrics and gynecology to induce labor, manage miscarriages, perform medication abortions, and control severe postpartum bleeding")
SHALULU: Perfume-mifepristone pitocin
SHAFALI: Fragrant-misoprostol
SHAHNTI: Peace-gestational ages
SHANTHI: Peace-prostaglandin Er
SHANTI: Peace-hemabate ampoule
SHARI: Arrow-dinoprostone miscellaneous
SHEELA: Character-carboprost tromethamine
SHANTIH: Shantih shantih shantih-oxytocine
Perhaps poem that got me most was about holding a (newborn/neverborn).
AN APOLOGY FOR OUR MOTHERS
(SAJANI rocks like when a lullaby)
A pace through the bedroom when she
turns to breathe into my clavicle. My
ankle—an obtrusion of crack
and swell and so we sit rhythming
hums with sleep and then we sleep
when she becomes an inhale/ex.
Another missing girl dreams to me
at dawn. My daughter would
be an heir or her own error.
My wild unmarried braid undone again.
’Til my estrus breaths—coconut oil soothes to fray.
Her memory’s a fragmented gamete
turn fontanel closed to form recognition
rattles and a coo. She could have been
dancing even to my uneven lazy beats.
But I cannot say that she disappeared
I cannot say that she was (n)everhere.
Being staged as a "play" the characters Sajani, Suvali, Sasmita, Shasha/Sheetal, Sarah, Sidhangana are "all unborn ghosts you know". These are the missing daughters conjured as spectral performers. Some of these deaths are deeply disturbing: "a cat trotted down the hospital hall with a female fetus dangling from her mouth." Some are medicalized into whispers folded (literally) in half across the Page: (Note: I had to look these up but these drugs are "uterotonic agents and prostaglandins used in obstetrics and gynecology to induce labor, manage miscarriages, perform medication abortions, and control severe postpartum bleeding")
SHALULU: Perfume-mifepristone pitocin
SHAFALI: Fragrant-misoprostol
SHAHNTI: Peace-gestational ages
SHANTHI: Peace-prostaglandin Er
SHANTI: Peace-hemabate ampoule
SHARI: Arrow-dinoprostone miscellaneous
SHEELA: Character-carboprost tromethamine
SHANTIH: Shantih shantih shantih-oxytocine
Perhaps poem that got me most was about holding a (newborn/neverborn).
AN APOLOGY FOR OUR MOTHERS
(SAJANI rocks like when a lullaby)
A pace through the bedroom when she
turns to breathe into my clavicle. My
ankle—an obtrusion of crack
and swell and so we sit rhythming
hums with sleep and then we sleep
when she becomes an inhale/ex.
Another missing girl dreams to me
at dawn. My daughter would
be an heir or her own error.
My wild unmarried braid undone again.
’Til my estrus breaths—coconut oil soothes to fray.
Her memory’s a fragmented gamete
turn fontanel closed to form recognition
rattles and a coo. She could have been
dancing even to my uneven lazy beats.
But I cannot say that she disappeared
I cannot say that she was (n)everhere.
May 29, 2026
will write more but a brilliant book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews