Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, California Book Award finalist and winner of the Nautilus Gold Award, the Alice James Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her chapbook Notes from the Birth Year was winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest, and her work has been recognized internationally with the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and VONA/Voices of Our Nations, and is a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists.

“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