Mothersalt

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Book cover for Mothersalt
Book cover for Mothersalt

Mothersalt

Mothersalt

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

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Description
Drawing from the sticky, milk-drenched reality of childbirth and pregnancy, Mothersalt explores the intimacies and bewilderment of early motherhood, illuminating the myriad ways in which the self, reconstituted through birth, can emerge into powerful, lyrical new forms of existence.

With haunting precision, Mothersalt explores the ways in which the lyric self is split apart and stitched back together through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Interspersed with tender addresses to a child in utero, Mothersalt recounts the fraught disorientation of giving birth in America, where birthing bodies are not always recognized as empowered agents of their own story. Through the failures and reversals of the self struggling to reclaim her experience of childbirth, Mothersalt asserts a powerful new narrative of what is possible, not only in the birthing room, but in all forms of human relation.

At its heart, this is a book about resilience, healing, and joy, and the sustaining life that emerges from practices of embodied care. Through fragmentary forms inspired by Sei Shōnagon's pillow book and the miscellany prose diaries of medieval Japan, Mothersalt brings careful, devoted attention to the labor involved in bearing and caring for young children, transforming the dimensions of the everyday and revealing its ephemeral beauty.

About the Author

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist, and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest. Mia holds degrees in creative writing from Stanford University and the University of Washington, and her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Critical Reviews

"Mia Ayumi Malhotra's Mothersalt charts--astoundingly, wondrously--the vast territories of the unnarratable that constitute motherhood, revealing to us how maternal caretaking is a locus of astonishing collisions: between profound intimacies and estrangements, mergings and fracturings, awakenings and bewilderments, violences, and heady joys. Malhotra's poems defy category, capturing motherhood with brilliance, rawness, and urgency. A wholly irreducible translation of what is ultimately outside of representation."
--Jenny Xie, author of The Rupture Tense


"In the wake of the wound that is birth, what does it mean to begin anew? Ardently, and with stunning precision, Mia Ayumi Malhotra mines the language of gestation and the collective wisdom of other mother-poets to (re)write the origin story. Part living archive of matrilineal inheritance; part daybook of pregnancy, birth, and the blurred beauty of early motherhood, Mothersalt enacts the ongoingness of a becoming rooted in the psyche-body. Born of the intertwined labors of making and mothering and imbued with a Winnicottian poetics of tenderness and tending, these lyrics are lifeworld."
--Heidi Van Horn, author of Belated Poem

Publishing Information

Publisher: Alice James Books
Pub date: 2025-05-13
Length: 100 pages

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