Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, California Book Award finalist and winner of the Nautilus Gold Award, the Alice James Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her chapbook Notes from the Birth Year was winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest, and her work has been recognized internationally with the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and VONA/Voices of Our Nations, and is a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists.

"Mothersalt is carefully crafted. ... The poems themselves appear as single, short prose blocks that unspool across several pages or as page-long pieces in long, single-stanza lines. Ample white space allows breath and time to enter, allows the reader room to wrestle with each poem’s complexity, to admire its dazzling light. ...Here one poet begets another. Here is where poems come from."
—Emily Perez, RHINO

"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."
—Rebecca Jane, Mom Egg Review

"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."
—Rob Mclennan

"I’m not exaggerating when I say I was shaken by the poems in Mothersalt—their multi-faceted beauty and physicality, as well as their voices, searching and finding and singing out truths."
—Emily Mohn-Slate

"Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Mothersalt charts—astoundingly, wondrously—the vast territories of the unnarratable that constitute motherhood, revealing to us how maternal caretaking is a locus of astonishing collisions: between profound intimacies and estrangements, mergings and fracturings, awakenings and bewilderments, violences, and heady joys. Malhotra’s poems defy category, capturing motherhood with brilliance, rawness, and urgency. A wholly irreducible translation of what is ultimately outside of representation."
—Jenny Xie

“In the wake of the wound that is birth, what does it mean to begin anew? Ardently, and with stunning precision, Mia Ayumi Malhotra mines the language of gestation and the collective wisdom of other mother-poets to (re)write the origin story. Part living archive of matrilineal inheritance; part daybook of pregnancy, birth, and the blurred beauty of early motherhood, Mothersalt enacts the ongoingness of a becoming rooted in the psyche-body. Born of the intertwined labors of making and mothering and imbued with a Winnicottian poetics of tenderness and tending, these lyrics are lifeworld.”
—Heidi Van Horn, author of Belated Poem

“Mothersalt is an exquisitely tender book. Yet even its musicality reveals Malhotra’s thinking as acute, precise, fierce, and finally, haunted. Childbearing and motherhood are not merely ‘subject’ or ‘story’; an existential storm blasts through these pages tearing at the borders between body/world, self/other, memory/timelessness. Alive with the unresolvable, with shapeshifting, Mothersalt creates a space to hold opposing emotions and contradictory thoughts without hedging or hiding, a space that becomes necessary—a blurred brightness, a blossoming persistent in storm.”
—Barbara Tomash, author of Her Scant State