I became a mother and I began to write like a Japanese woman. Which is to say: I began to write like myself—from the imaginary whence my mother’s mother and her mother before her came. Things That Are Distant Though Near: Festivals celebrated near the Palace. The zigzag path leading up to the temple of Kurama.When I became a mother, my lines began to grow less regular, less sculpted—and this itinerant prose did not adhere to shapeliness.Instead it spilled from birth into death and questions of beauty, arranging itself as it wished. An artful, yet imperfect text.And so I began to build strange, unkempt houses for my words to live in. Interior spaces without doors, only half-imagined windows, which opened to rooms where a person could wander, lost, for days.It’s no surprise this didn’t happen earlier—in school, for instance, when a professor handed me a book of haiku.Deeply Irritating Things: A man who discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. Tell me about the form mothering takes on the page. Why it accumulates so—fragments, notes. A slow, painstaking assemblage.And I found myself heavy with the days.And my belly bulged with them.And the days accreted like lines.Things That Give a Clean Feeling: An earthen cup. A new metal bowl. The play of the light on water as one pours it into a vessel.
On Form
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“On Form” forthcoming in Mothersalt by Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Alice James Books, 2025
Copyright © 2023 by Mia Ayumi Malhotra.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, forthcoming May 2025) and 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. Mia is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. Currently she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches poetry and is working on a manuscript about sacred music and the interior life.
"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
“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
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