Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Mothersalt

 

Like an object from space, birth language is a sign of alien life: Mucus plug. Meconium. Also the language of newborns, with its twisted syntax of sleepless nights and bleary, milk-washed mornings. Rooting, latch. Fore- and hindmilk. For now, this private lexicon of flutter kick, swim. What feels like a heart, tumbling through the body. (“MOTHERSALT”)

From San Francisco Bay Area poet Mia Ayumi Malhotra comes the collection Mothersalt (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), following her full-length debut, Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018) and subsequent chapbook, Notes from the Birth Year (Bateau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “I am beautiful with you. I wear you emblazoned across my face,” she writes, as part of the title prose sequence, “herald of my life to come.” Set with opening and closing poems on either side of three sections of meditative, first-person lyrics, Mothersalt expands the boundaries of her Notes from the Birth Year, offering a book-length suite of poems that provide an exploration, a grounding, on pregnancy and mothering, motherhood and family. “Tell me again about mothering. About the form it takes.” she writes, to open the poem “ON MOTHERING.” There is something deeply intimate and immediate about how she approaches these poems, akin to notes from a journal, carved and honed across graceful lines and still waters, run deep: “How language dawns slowly,” the opening poem, “WHERE POEMS COME FROM,” offers, “then all at once. / The dry, whitish lid working its way, reptilelike, / up the bird’s eye. This isn’t really about the duck, / the pointing. The point is that I saw you seeing / a creature for the first time—paused motionless / on the bridge, bits of debris shifting understood. / Every day you make some new utterance—ball, / more, meow—closing the space between the world / you live in and your name for it.”

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; of a rich and densely-lyric musicality, one that approaches the poem from the foundation first of form. It is fascinating to see the shape of Malhotra’s approach, focusing her lyric as a conversation around form, both poetic and personal, and how the boundaries of each might be expanded, well beyond anything she might have expected. “Tell me about the form mothering takes on the page.” she writes, as part of the poem “ON FORM,” a poem that also includes:

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.