Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s second poetry collection, Mothersalt, explores the intimacies and bewilderment of early motherhood. It posits that “Labor is a temple with many faces,” zooming in to a mother’s tender address to her child in utero: “I am beautiful with you” and pans out to comment upon how childbirth “haunts” (drawing from Jane Wong’s scholarly work on the poetics of haunting) the speaker as an Asian American woman looking at “History—that trauma which will not forget us.” Poetry as discourse of intellectual thought, “spilled from birth into death and questions of beauty, arranging itself as it wished.” What results is stunning “itinerant prose” that “did not adhere to shapeliness,” “artful, yet imperfect” across the “smearing effect of time, memory.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Where Poems Come From,” introduce the reader to the poems that follow? To me, it is the elegant close looking at the exteriority (the duck) which reflects the search for “something / we could not see but knew all the same was there.”
Mia Ayumi Malhotra: That’s such a lovely reading of the poem—thank you, Tiffany. From pretty early on, beginning with “Where Poems Come From” felt like the right way to open the book. It’s a poem about language, obviously (speech acquisition, naming, etymology), but in the context of maternal caregiving, which is basically a summary of the book itself. It asks questions about consciousness, perception—and gestures, in its final lines, toward that realm that exists beyond language, the “something” we cannot see but know is there, all the same. Indirectly, this poem is also interested in the material properties of language: sound, rhythm, the pleasures of assonance and alliteration, “seeing a creature for the first time... on the bridge, bits of debris shifting underfoot. Every day you make”—how these syllables feel in the mouth.
The prose sequence that follows begins with the line, “Like an object from space, birth language is a sign of alien life: Mucus plug. Meconium.” Again, there’s a return to the question of language, the relation of naming to lived experience, whether it’s pregnancy’s “private lexicon of flutter kick, swim” or the newborn’s “twisted syntax of sleepless nights and bleary, milk-washed mornings.” Later, I quote Miranda Field in saying, “After I left the birth bed, I began to want a poetry in which motherhood was not so much its subject matter but its growing medium—the infrastructural condition of the poet’s feeling and speaking mind.” This idea guided so much of my thinking in the making of this book; I suppose “Where Poems Come From” is my first attempt to enact this form of art-making, in which mothering is not necessarily the subject (though in Mothersalt, it often is), but the underlying structure of the artist-mother’s mind.
TT: You write, “Labor is a temple with many faces.” In “Dear Body–” you write: “I sink to my knees, wracked by contractions so strong, it’s a kind of dismemberment.”
What is your writing process like? Does it occur concurrent or subsequent to the labor?
MAM: Mothersalt began as a series of prose poems which followed the progression of my second pregnancy (“Week 32, Day 3”; “Week 33, Day 6”; etc.). If I remember correctly, I wrote the very first lines at the beginning of the third trimester, stealing a few quiet moments in my parents’ guestroom while they watched my older daughter: “Increasingly, I lose my breath, caught in the close room of pregnancy...” I continued writing through the subsequent weeks, right up to the birth of my younger daughter, and then, somewhat deliriously, during the months that followed. Some of this early writing evolved into Mothersalt’s title sequence, which I eventually separated into three sections and threaded through the manuscript as a kind of narrative throughline.
It took me a few years to feel ready to work on the book in earnest, and when I did, I gave myself a full year just to explore the project’s scope through a research process that involved a lot of interviews with birth practitioners, visits to birthing centers, reading, and self-reflection. Coming to a fuller understanding of childbirth in the context of American hospital birth helped me piece together the story I wanted to tell about my two births, and how I had come to terms with the experience, as a poet and a parent. In so many ways, it was the unscripted process of learning to (re)construct the telling of those birth stories that taught me how to write a book like this, one that unfolds in a kind of spiral, circling back to the same moment over and over again to try and make sense of something that has occurred so far outside the realm of language that it only exists, borrowing here from Fanny Howe, as a “bloom or smear.” As I say in the book: “We begin, and then we begin again.”
TT: The collection has three sections, bookended by “Where Poems Come From” and “Instax: A New Lyric.” How did you land on the three-sectioned structure and how did you organize the poems within each of the three sections?
MAM: This question feels related to the evolution of the “Mothersalt” poems I just described. As I moved beyond my “research year,” a form of gestation in itself, and began drafting the actual manuscript, I started to think about pregnancy—with its trimesters and weekly comparisons to pieces of fruit that increase in size, along with the bizarre changes that accompany it (“darkening of the armpits, the knee and elbow flexes. Deepened sweat glands... the appearance of a dark line, reaching from navel to groin”), as its own kind of narrative structure. Same for the stages of birth, which, oddly enough, is also divided into three parts: labor, birth, and placental delivery. Even birth labor occurs in three distinct phases: early labor, active labor, and transition. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, everything about pregnancy had to do with the experience of time as an embodied mechanism of change. And so, “I became obsessed with the passage of time. Something about the marks it made on my skin as it stretched past.”
And I found myself heavy with the days.
And my belly bulged with them.
And the days accreted like lines.
And maybe it’s because I’m a poet, and I like writing in patterns that take their form from life, but unearthing the three-part structure buried in all the material I’d accumulated from the research and drafting process felt like the right thing to do. As in life, the sections are interwoven and roughly chronological, in that they follow the arc of pregnancy and birth, then continue into what’s often referred to as the “fourth trimester,” the tender weeks after birth during which parent and newborn require a kind of womblike enfolding, the “confinement” period that so many families observe.
And yet. There’s also something deeply haunted—deeply smeared—about the book’s unfolding. In one moment, the first birth has already happened, but then it hasn’t. And then it’s described as a memory, imperfectly recalled, which occurs a second time, but in the narrative present. And, in fact, it’s a different birth. Then it’s the same birth, but imagined as a kind of speculative fiction, a story the speaker wants to write “backward and forward.” This messy, disjunctive chronology took shape as I worked through each new revision (third, fifth... twelfth...) of the book, and I began to think of its inconsistencies and reversals as a way of mapping my own birth into motherhood, an evolution of self which was linked to my children’s births, yes, but also totally distinctive. I didn’t learn this word until after I’d already written the book, but the term for this process of becoming is matrescence.
TT: “On Form” begins:
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.
Many of the poems are titled “On” followed by the topic in question. So we have: “On Form,” “On Gestation and Becoming,” “On Mothering,” and other topics. That is connected with the idea of the essay being a moving forward towards or grappling with an idea.
Could you speak to the itinerant prose poetry forms that characterize Mothersalt? How does it follow the lineage of Heian-era Japanese women poets from Sei Shōnagon (who you quote here) to the present?
MAM: I’ve spoken elsewhere about how it felt to discover this lineage (in this interview with the hybrid-genre poet Heidi Van Horn, for instance), but it was a kind of happy accident that I stumbled across a translation of The Pillow Book in my research, as well as several other works of Japanese fragmentary prose: Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Yoshida Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa or “Essays in Idleness.” At the time, I was already reading John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay, recommended to me by lyric essayist Jennifer S. Cheng, so maybe this was less of an accident and more of the natural outcome of the exploration I was doing at the time. Regardless, I had reached a point in my life and writing where the seamlessness of the lyric “I,” and of narrative itself, felt insufficient for the task of representing on the page what I had experienced in childbirth. As with my first book, Isako Isako, I felt “a new grammar [was] necessary,” and the essayistic poems you’ve described (“On Form,” “On Gestation and Becoming,” etc.) were my way to inhabit this new “feeling and speaking mind,” to return to Miranda Field’s quote from earlier. “After I left the birth bed,” as she says, I had the distinct feeling that I needed to exit “poetry,” as I knew it, to find the thing I was looking for: a form that was both ongoing and interrupted; fragmented and whole; bewildered, yet moving toward a specific horizon, however undefinable that future might be—much like my emerging self as an artist-mother. Like (re)discovering my identity as a Nikkei or Japanese diasporic writer, this departure was actually a form of homecoming, which leads me to wonder if our growth as artists sometimes asks that we leave the known, in order to discover a deepened capacity for knowing self and world.
TT: You also write, in “Bad Birth: A Retrospective”: “A poetics of haunting means a return to haunted places. It means choosing to tell the story from the beginning.”
In what way is your labor connected with “History–that trauma which will not forget us” and how do you approach the idea that “You can build a good story around a bad one” when “the ugliness persists”?
MAM: My thinking about the poetics of haunting is drawn directly from Jane Wong’s scholarly work on Asian American poetry, which asks, among other questions, what it means to insist on a “deliberate, powerful, and provocative move toward haunted places” in the context of legacies of colonialism, war, and marginalization. Jane’s scholarship was critical to my understanding of the American hospital birth experience as I sifted through countless articles, interviews, and historical and medical anthropology texts. This was how I learned about the medicalization of birth, and how the male-dominated field of obstetrics maligned traditional midwifery and its female practitioners, and moved birth from the home to the hospital, where women’s bodies were viewed through the lens of pathology. I also learned about J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” whose research was founded on inhumane experiments that he performed on enslaved women without their consent or the use of anesthesia. Reading Dominique Christina’s Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems, I realized that, like most powerful institutions in American life, the origins of modern gynecology are indistinguishable from the brutal, exploitative logic of American race-based slavery.
The deeper I delved into this history, the more rage I felt. In earlier versions of the book, sections of Mothersalt were quite manifestolike; militant, even. Though decisions about birth are deeply personal, and every body is different, I firmly believe that every birthing person is entitled to know what options they have in labor, as well as the invisible forces they’re contending with as they enter the birthing field. So much of contemporary life is shaped by histories of exploitation and racism that are unseen but nonetheless remain active in shaping our lives today. In Mothersalt, I wanted to tell the story of childbirth in such a way that exposed the interpretive framework of medicalized hospital birth, as well as its history: drugged newborns, twilight sleep, leather cuffs and all. To see birth as natural and women’s bodies as powerful, rather than as inferior or weak, dramatically influences the interventions and outcomes that a person experiences in labor. Thus, “Time to birth a new narrative. To put our bodies back in the story, and the story back into our lives.”
TT: In “On filling the space,” you write “To mother the space is to make it full.” How do you feel you achieve that space-filling through the poems in the collection?
MAM: I’ll be honest, I don’t know how successfully I’ve mothered the poems in this book... maybe D.W. Winnicott’s “good enough mother” is the rubric I need to draw on, thinking this question through, but I do know that Mothersalt enacts a form of narrative that feels authentic to my experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. To the best of my ability, I’ve represented the journey of coming to terms with my two birth experiences, and I do feel confident that the book has created a space in which I exist fully as an artist-mother. This feels related in my mind to what the painter Jenny Saville says about watching her children grow, their bodies “constantly changing,” that “the level of love was so beautiful—I felt all these things... circulating in me.” Beauty, love, pain and tenderness, self-doubt and ambivalence and nostalgia—in all my reading, I didn’t find a book that fully reflected my experience of mothering and birth, so I suppose I can say that I did actually write the book I was searching for, all those years.
TT: What are you working on today?
MAM: I’m working on a few different projects right now. One is a manuscript about music and the interior life, which explores the relationship between sound, architecture, and the body, mostly in relation to sacred music and my fascination with the pipe organ, an instrument so large that you can literally climb inside it and lose yourself (maybe a form of homecoming, as I said earlier) in its sound. I know Louise Glück wasn’t talking about organ music when she wrote this, but her lines from The Wild Iris, “this summer we have entered eternity. / I felt your two hands / bury me to release its splendor” always come to mind when I’m dazzled by the organ’s many-splendored voice(s). I’m also experimenting with a constellation of subjects: lacework (punto in aria = stitches in air), embroidery, Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, Agnes Martin, the color blue, Virginia Woolf, and Ruth Asawa’s looped wire sculptures... At this stage, the connections feel more intuitive than anything else, which is a little scary, but I do sense an unmistakable energy—a resonance or shimmer between them, maybe something like the “lacy filigree of feeling” Danielle Vogel talks about in A Library of Light.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
MAM: Before writing Mothersalt, I was told that I’d had a “good birth,” and that because my child had been successfully delivered, the story was over. And yet, in preparing for the birth of my second child, why did I feel such estrangement from my own body, to the extent that I couldn’t even narrate the experience to myself in a way that made sense? In “moving toward” the haunting of that first birth, I had to confront the bewilderment and motherlessness that I later described in the book, feelings that left me with a sense of abandonment, even in the midst of a room filled with people. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in this process; the doula who attended my second birth also helped guide me through this deep, preparatory birthwork, a journey that continued to unfold as I wrote and revised the poems that became Mothersalt. In “After/birth,” I quote Gloria Anzaldúa in saying, “Writing is a process of discovery, a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from wounds, traumas, racism, and other acts of violence.” It was from this struggle for healing that the “Dear Body—” sequence was born, as I worked to (re)write the story of childbirth in a way that centered my body, rather than the medical interventions and hospital protocols that had taken control of the narrative. And that, by the way, was exactly my experience of the second birth: a reclamation, not only of my body, but its power, which I experienced as the kind of pain that drove me out of my mind, transforming me—animal, alive—not as a sign of disease or distress, but instead, of strength. The work I did between births, as well as in the years that followed, allowed me to reframe completely the meaning of labor, pain, and my relationship to my own body, which was precisely the journey I wanted to embody in Mothersalt, making a whole from parts that both acknowledged the violence of the seams, the wound, the sustos, but also the fact that this rupture was the means by which a new wholeness or integration was possible.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, 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, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest. Mia’s work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and she is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. Mia is a 2025-2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.