Of Milk and Light: Mothersalt — an Interview with Mia Ayumi Malhotra November 7, 2025
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 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 founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women, transfeminine, and nonbinary artists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a 2025–2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Sherif Abdelkarim: To my mind, porous best characterizes Mothersalt’s affective planes. The poems’ lines pour into one another like water (or milk)—a single word might create this effect (“duck,” “pear,” “deliver”). Does this poetic porosity reflect the porosity of the motherly body?
Mia Ayumi Malhotra: Absolutely. So much about the experience of mothering makes a person feel porous. The many fluids (how I came to the title of the book, Mothersalt: “salt” as in blood, as in sweat, as in tears, urine, amniotic fluid), the infant’s persistent crying, the intensity of their need; the passage of time even. “I pass through the days,” I say in the book’s title sequence, “or perhaps they pass through me.” Yet interestingly enough, this porousness is something a mother must resist in order to survive—not just for herself but for the sake of the fetus as well. This is something I explore in the poem “After/birth,” in which I say, “As the placenta forms, bits of the baby’s DNA slip into the mother’s bloodstream—a fraught, interpenetrating intimacy. // If the mother does not defend herself against this onslaught of need, she will not survive, which is to say that a fetus’s life is wholly dependent on its mother’s ability to fight back.”
Abdelkarim: Does Mothersalt move in accordance with the span of a pregnancy? an infant’s weaning? a generation or two?
Malhotra: Yes, to all those progressions: pregnancy, the weaning process, the passing of generations. The book contains three parts, much like the trimesters of a pregnancy or the stages of labor: early labor, active labor, and transition. Even birth itself occurs in a pattern of three: labor, birth, and delivery of the placenta. Mothersalt looselyfollows this same chronology, although each section also contains numerous reversals and recursions, reflecting a certain hauntedness in the book’s unfolding.
Abdelkarim: I gleaned a few recursions across this collection—in some of the poems’ titles (“Mothersalt,” “Dear Body—”), otherwise we return to certain people (the narrator’s mother) or places (the ward, the home). Do you plot the poems according to a linear arrangement, or can we read them out of order?
Malhotra: Like raising a child or experiencing any other dimension of human life, really, I feel it’s possible to inhabit time both linearly and recursively. We’re born, we grow, we give birth, we die, and then the cycle continues. I think it’s the same for the poems, which can be read from beginning to end, following a more or less narrative arc, or approached out of order, in which case the reader might instead be tracking various echoes or recurring memories across time, through a kind of associative logic (again: haunted) that links one poem to the next. In structuring the book, I was interested in the way a story could, in its telling, actually return to the same ground, even as it progressed through time. The spiral, the labyrinth: these are the forms that most captivated my attention, in how they circle back on themselves while also moving toward—or away from—a clearly defined moment in space and time.
Abdelkarim: One of my favorite lines in Mothersalt comes midway in the collection: “the more I give, the more I have.” It’s a beautiful idea, since on the surface Mothersalt meditates on so many losses of oneself (whatever that ever was—“me” time?). Are we learning to get over or lose a part of ourselves in Mothersalt, or does giving entail a more substantial reconceptualization of or return to traditional forms of the self?
Malhotra: It’s one of the great mysteries of the human body that a person’s milk supply increases in response to the baby’s need; that it’s through the giving of itself that the body enters into this incredible state of abundance, something I never could have imagined, if I hadn’t had the opportunity to breastfeed my kids. Even after I had weaned my second child, I thought a great deal about the significance of lactation and breastfeeding; how that cycle of radical abundance embodied this incredible economy of gift and provision, maybe something like the cycle of nurture and care that developmental psychologists talk about as a process that feeds itself; we nurture our young because we care for them, and thus, through the act of nurturance, come to care for them. Regardless, my profound experience of the body’s provision felt like some sort of little-known, carefully suppressed secret, which every person on the planet had once known but chose to forget, believing instead in the illusion of limited resources and scarcity mindset. Can you even imagine what it would be like for us, as a society, to remember our origins? To build a world on that logic of abundance?
Abdelkarim: That’s one of my/our greatest challenges: to accept the laws of abundance about us. Literarily, I recognize this law when bringing words to the page, where words give way to sentences, to stanzas, to another creation. Though Mothersalt throws into relief the unique losses with which women artists come to terms upon becoming mothers, it also shows us how motherhood feeds poiesis. This leads me to wonder: has poetry—whether your art or that of the voices you bring to your collection—enhanced or otherwise informed your motherhood? How has poetry made you a [better] mother?
Malhotra: I’m currently reading Jordan Troeller’s Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (MIT Press, 2025) and have been thinking a lot about the artist-mother; how capacious that identity is, and how, in so many ways, it’s characterized by this capacity to hold opposing realities in powerful relation to one another, embodying all these so-called binaries (artist/mother, life/art, home/studio, public/private) in a person’s singular, precious life. There are times when it feels like those identities cancel each other out, but my suspicion is that that’s precisely the kind of patriarchal logic that we as artists, whose work emerges from realms of imaginative possibility, must resist. In examining the lives of people like Ruth Asawa, Imogen Cunningham, Lucille Clifton, and so many more, it is evident to me that, like one of Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures, a person’s art and family life can exist together seamlessly as, in her words, “continuous forms opening into forms.” I’m not one to downplay the difficulties of making art while caring for small children; in fact, it takes as much creativity, determination, and collective effort to navigate family life as it does to make art, but I do believe that a fully integrated creative life is one that exists across all realms of an artist’s experience, including their home and family life. I’m thinking now about an interview I did years ago with the poet Heidi Van Horn, in which we talked, among other things, about the possibility of “motherhood as a necessary condition for poetry [and] poetry as a vital context for motherhood.”
Abdelkarim: Yesterday after breakfast, I read your “Today” poems to my mother. We laughed and sighed in turn. Afterward, we shared the thought that your daughters’ milestones, which fall like rain, are ours. Did you compose these poems with a universalist outlook? How specific are the “daughters” to whom you dedicate Mothersalt?
Malhotra: I love the image of you reading the “Today” poems to your mom at the breakfast table! Those are my kids’ favorites for sure, mostly because their voices are the main feature… and adorably so! At least in my mind, I wrote every detail in Mothersalt for my children specifically, although I totally understand why you would ask about the possibility of a more generalized or universal audience. I think it’s one of poetry’s great paradoxes that only through the textures of individualized experience do we encounter life’s universality. I talk about this with my students sometimes, how important it is to develop a lexicon rooted in language as specific as possible—in talking about the sublimeness of sound, for instance, a poet needs to know the anatomy of the inner ear: the cochlear swirl, the organ of Corti, the stirrup, the hammer, because it’s through the fine grain of this lens that we learn to see—and to write—with greater precision.
Abdelkarim: Do you feel your own early “non-memories” or shadow experiences of childhood unearthed upon your replaying the cycle, now in the different role of mother? Do they repeat themselves with your own daughter? In asking this question I attempt to get at two paradoxes: that of retracing your own weaning at the hands of your mother, and that of holding the memories for your daughters (“Laguna”). Who holds the memories anyway? How so?
Malhotra: Writing Mothersalt, I did reach a point at which it became clear to me that in order to inhabit the full arc of the book, I had to (re)inhabit my own experience of being mothered: how it felt to be cared for as a young child, how I imagined the life of my unborn self, its gestation in my mother’s body. Interestingly enough, it’s those poems that acted as a portal into my new manuscript, which explores sound, architecture, and the interior life—including the veiled existence of the inner child and her relationship to music through the vehicle of her mother’s voice. Much of my thinking in this project has been shaped by Li-Young Lee, who writes, “It’s impossible for me to talk about my mother. She comes before everything, before words, before the world, and before words for the world. Before syntax… My mother’s face is the first face. She is the first voice. The face and the voice before everything.”
Abdelkarim: Here’s something technical. How did your book’s visual design arise? Given how deliberate you are in your references, I wonder if you had a say in Tiani Kennedy’s design.
Malhotra: As with my first book, Isako Isako(Alice James Books, 2018), I really enjoyed working with the (now former) managing editor of Alice James Books, Alyssa Neptune, and the book designer the press had chosen for the project. I was asked to submit a number of options for cover art and, happily, the press went with the piece I’d ranked as my first choice, a gorgeous indigo-dye print called “Celestial Blue” by Tacoma-based artist and printmaker Yoshi Nakagawa. The artwork was everything I’d hoped for: cosmic, delicate, pattern-based, and rooted in a Nikkei, or Japanese diasporic, aesthetic sensibility. The repeated print motif, which Yoshi collaged on 100% cotton paper, looks like a series of tiny constellations—pinpricks of light, breastmilk, aureolas, stars, echoed across a vast, uncharted galaxy. For the rest of the book’s design, I got to mix-and-match elements of two different options that Tiani Kennedy had put together for my consideration. With Alyssa’s input, we went back and forth a few times to trial various combinations of font, sizing, and layout, and in the end, I was delighted with the result.
