Review by Rebecca Jane
Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that of the Writer, the Japanese American, the Friend, the Patient, the Lover of language, and the Guardian of memories. These poems reveal the mind as a source of keen attentiveness that wrests the telling details and underscores life’s complicated plexus of pain and joy. “Labor is a temple with many faces” (25). Along the way, we pause to hear the crunch of gravel under the feet and observe the moment a child notices something new, just before a voice imparts language, and we witness the precise moment where lexicon meets wonder. Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a collection that won a Maine Literary Award for Excellence in Publishing and was the 2018 Nautilus Gold Award winner. Malhotra is also a winner of multiple international prizes and fellowships and is the founder of The Ruby SF, a space that supports QT BIPOC Bay Area creatives.
While Isako Isako stands out for its courageous critique of Japanese internment in the US during World War II, Mothersalt contains a bold retrospective that critiques obstetrics for its truth-claims. Even if it was just a generation ago, the aggressive use of forceps, restraints, morphine, and twilight sleep confronts the medical profession with its culpability in childbirth trauma. This record supports the insight that the language, perception, and social dynamics that emerge in the hospital labor and delivery ward need to be re-examined and updated. People who choose to give birth deserve to know their free agency and power, and Malhotra asserts “We cannot fight old power in old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our creation, at the same time as we are resisting” (29). Her rallying cry for creating while resisting resonates throughout the collection, igniting the fuel for inspiration.
But what about plenty of women who lose babies or endure harrowing childbirth? Malhotra reflects on her mother’s experience of losing a baby and losing a sister around the same time and what it meant for that story to remain silent through the years, but “Hearing this story is like breathing air that has not been breathed for forty years” (15). This reminds us to consider how much of women’s / mothers’ experiences of life from her perspective and sensitivities have gone invisible and ignored. Putting words to pregnancy and labor and childrearing remains an uncharted territory and “For a mother to be wholly a mother while being a writer and not an angel would create a new literature” (17).
Let’s embrace this new literature as it delivers a freer expression to the world. Let’s embrace what it means to fill the space with motherhood. Because now it is time to acknowledge that “Womanhood is the country I come from, a home I reach back for to reproduce, recreate, replenish” (56). 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.
Mothersalt by Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Alice James Books, May, 2025, 60 pages, $24.95, paper
ISBN: 978194994472
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).