Mothersalt

Drawing from the sticky, milk-drenched reality of childbirth and pregnancy, Mothersalt explores the intimacies and bewilderment of early motherhood, illuminating the myriad ways in which the self, reconstituted through birth, can emerge into powerful, lyrical new forms of existence.

With haunting precision, Mothersalt explores the ways in which the lyric self is split apart and stitched back together through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Interspersed with tender addresses to a child in utero, Mothersalt recounts the fraught disorientation of giving birth in America, where birthing bodies are not always recognized as empowered agents of their own story. Through the failures and reversals of the self struggling to reclaim her experience of childbirth, Mothersalt asserts a powerful new narrative of what is possible, not only in the birthing room, but in all forms of human relation.

At its heart, this is a book about resilience, healing, and joy, and the sustaining life that emerges from practices of embodied care. Through fragmentary forms inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book and the miscellany prose diaries of medieval Japan, Mothersalt brings careful, devoted attention to the labor involved in bearing and caring for young children, transforming the dimensions of the everyday and revealing its ephemeral beauty.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of 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 holds degrees in creative writing from Stanford University and the University of Washington, and her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.