“The book completes what, in life, was incomplete: a father-daughter collaboration, the "glowing-seething archive" of energies as yet unconsolidated, yet unleashed.

Vidhu Aggarwal's DAUGHTER ISOTOPE is contra-fate, written with "silt and fronds," traveling alongside the ovule-corpse, the otherbody of what in global English might be called a Goddess but here is closer to an act of adoration, a "sumptuary pulse." Hanuman dilates then contracts, boson to supernova, and here in the Kill Room, "subjects" are "seeking their bodies." The Mahabarat: an epic never intended to be read aloud in a consecutive sequence, or time, or by one person.

For this reason, Aggarwal's collection, which edges beyond literature into "feverish, makeshift" codes and indices, the "combustive interior" habitat of a massive and multiple online personas, was exhilarating to read."

–Bhanu Kapil

Vidhu Aggarwal’s explosive DAUGHTER ISOTOPE radioactivates form, not in the surface threat of animating the formal contingencies, say of Modernisms, but in how it complicates ancient sentience through A.I. subjectivities, where fate and circumstance pulsate—human, machine, body, mine—a “catalog [of] metabolic functions,” with its “nose against the dank,” as dangerous as the lowest levels of The Matrix, where Aggarwal’s own robotic probes hunt, leaving a memory cloud as familiarly human as “…forever smelling of grease and ketchup,” but also “...rejiggered into a ghost-ship-carnival-cruise[…]giga girdle.”

Aggarwal ingeniously composes a complex neo-eco-system of metal, sign, myth, and legend, where poetry divinely serves as interlocutor where its “spine winds into an infinity loop.” Here, deft multi-modal experiments exact mechanisms of decomposition, as much as reconstitution always “on hallucinogenic speed dial,”— “across disparate territories, partitions, climates—.”

DAUGHTER ISOTOPE enacts a brilliantly expert visual, sonic and tactile interior fused to our current world, deployed in Aggarwal’s vivid neural fields of language.

–Ronaldo V. Wilson

“At once atlas, instruction manual, encyclopedia, elegy, and gurgling biodata stream, DAUGHTER ISOTOPE bursts and overwhelms with its lava lamp hallucinations and specters, its otherworldly creatures whose divinities are marred but enriched with gunk, spillage, overflow.

Vidhu’s work is drawn from Hindu cosmology and mythos, pop culture, and a sense of unstoppable hurtling into an eternal net of tangled futures but at the same time is tied to a deep specificity, kaleidoscopically recapitulating the galactic at the scale of the diasporic family, collecting and distilling vast essences at the scale of an Indian-American household.

The language(s) in DAUGHTER ISOTOPE rush around you with a seemingly inevitable sense of speed and oiliness, of velocity and viscosity. The multiplicity of voices, the choruses that wail like futurist qawwali within this collection, map out a sonic and textual cartography-tapestry of both cosmic and intimate proportions – a multiplicity that erupts within a single piece but also crackles between each of the poems.

A volume of delicious excess, a dizzying variety of textures, sounds, wounds and caresses that simultaneously charm and blind, all sparkling like mirrorwork on an infinite, 22nd-century celestial kurta. “

–Bishakh Som

“Vidhu Aggarwal’s DAUGHTER ISOTOPE chants squishy myth vortexes to recode your body-mind. Give yourself to decay and renewal. Play with ‘sacred raging atoms.’ DAUGHTER ISOTOPE is a high-energy mélange of the holy and the profane, visual and visceral.

Aggarwal drives a cloud-computing daughter into careening slingshots around gods to launch into digital dis/re/embodiment. Fragments come back as lights of a disco ball that becomes a head, or as a cow that speaks. All translate bio-function into digital data and back again, where the ‘atlas spurts out of my belly and breath.’ Aggarwal’s language soars and sparks, and my gut vibrates in futuristic sympathy when I read of ‘fine-scale filamentous heterogeneities/hosed through the eruptive stoma/of the melt generation.’”

–Petra Kuppers