Mothersalt - by Mia Ayumi Malhotra (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 Shåonagon'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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Mothersalt insists on telling the story of the mother's labor in the birth story, on the story of the mother who creates herself, despite every imposed impossibility. How exciting to see another fantastic poetry collection about early motherhood."
--Katherine Indermaur, The Colorado Review

"In her new collection, Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra writes about motherhood with wit, heart, and bracing candor. ... There is, in fact, a shapeliness in these pieces with their long, extended lines that seem to hover between verse and prose, regret and love."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club

"Mothersalt traces Malhotra's experience of becoming a mother, moving through pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum period, and early childrearing. Its 27 poems capture the joy and anxiety of new motherhood with honesty, skillful language, and careful attention to aesthetic detail."
--Yuki Obayashi, Nichi Bei Times

"In examining early motherhood and her vocation as a writer, Malhotra's work is one which constructs, alongside a human child, a body for the tentative I, the ghost of the self."
--Asa Drake, Michigan Quarterly Review

"Mothersalt is carefully crafted. ... The poems themselves appear as single, short prose blocks that unspool across several pages or as page-long pieces in long, single-stanza lines. Ample white space allows breath and time to enter, allows the reader room to wrestle with each poem's complexity, to admire its dazzling light. ...Here one poet begets another. Here is where poems come from."
--Emily Perez, RHINO

"Even with the critiques and hard truths, this collection still leaves us feeling 'fat with joy' (56) that we can then watch effervesce and disappear in the glow (60). Mothersalt provides plenty of glow for all of us to bask in and plenty of food for thought, too."
--Rebecca Jane, Mom Egg Review

"Mothersalt exists as a book of breath and simultaneous exploration of the interplay between lyric and motherhood, and how one might inform or shift the other."
--Rob Mclennan

"I'm not exaggerating when I say I was shaken by the poems in Mothersalt--their multi-faceted beauty and physicality, as well as their voices, searching and finding and singing out truths."
--Emily Mohn-Slate

"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

"Mothersalt is an exquisitely tender book. Yet even its musicality reveals Malhotra's thinking as acute, precise, fierce, and finally, haunted. Childbearing and motherhood are not merely 'subject' or 'story'; an existential storm blasts through these pages tearing at the borders between body/world, self/other, memory/timelessness. Alive with the unresolvable, with shapeshifting, Mothersalt creates a space to hold opposing emotions and contradictory thoughts without hedging or hiding, a space that becomes necessary--a blurred brightness, a blossoming persistent in storm."
--Barbara Tomash, author of Her Scant State

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.