Daughter Isotope

Daughter Isotope is a book of hybrid poems that speaks to multiple iterations of daughter tropes across generations national borders and timescales. Central to the question of the Daughter Isotope is: What is a collective archive? within a global disparate migrant cultural space. DI is organized in a series of four clouds calling up the vague penetrable borders of our digital lives both searching and searchable.Throughout the manuscript the poems operate as types of search engines that test the boundaries of often overlapping archives or clouds that make up diasporic experience. Starting with a series of poems based on the Mahabharata an encyclopedic Sanskrit epic-cloud about an apocalyptic war composed over centuries the organization of the manuscript is based off of South Asian polyvocal storytelling traditions. Like Donna Haraways cyborg a daughter gender could be seen as any child or subject under a rigid paternal order - whether Hindu nationalism or U.S. exceptionalism - whose filiation is in question. Dispersed through the manuscript are multiple versions/clouds of Draupadi Emily Dickinson Judy Garland Krishna Michael Jackson and the aspirational figure of @agirl among others uncertain daughters. Poems interrogate the stability of various daughter genders through myth online personas computer gaming nuclear physics and artificial intelligence.