Book Review

Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s second collection, stretches the limits of genre just as the speaker’s pregnancies and young children stretch her body, the hours of her waking, and her modes of thinking across these pages. Mothersalt memorializes and reimagines pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Throughout the book, Malhotra seeks to reform the time and space our culture allots to mothers. In “On Mothering,” she writes and quotes from Miranda Field’s essay on Fanny Howe in the anthology Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections:

Interruptions, fractured sleep. The weird circularity of the days, accreting toward some hazy, impenetrable distance.

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.

The self, no longer a contained or containable thing, became multiplicitous—an overspill.

All-encompassing caretaking work like mothering requires every part of the caregiver. To take on additional work, the caregiver must carve out little bits of “interrupted, fractured” time. And yet, despite the public perception that the writer-mother is “that impossible beast” for managing both, the body and mind of the mother continue to “overspill” with abundance. It is the math of breastfeeding, in which, as Malhotra writes, “the more I give, the more I have.”

Love begets more love, and inside stolen slivers of time more time impossibly opens. In the poem “Today,” the days collapse and time ripples outward with each iteration of the titular word: “Today you touched your chest and said your name for the first time. / Today you asked what comes after white hair. Maybe rainbow, you said.” In this poem, there is no yesterday or tomorrow.

This is not to say that time expands magically or without effort. All of Mothersalt resonates with hard-won song. Its lines are written in recognition of their own impossibility. In a piece published in the poetry journal Periodicities, Malhotra explained, “it’s such a slim volume. . . . Like blood drawn from a stone. Grace unfurled from the razor’s edge, that narrow line I walked for nearly a decade, trying to mother and write and make art from life.” The tension between mother/mothering and the institution of motherhood is a threatening one. The institution, as Adrienne Rich wrote in her landmark 1976 book Of Woman Born, threatens to annihilate the mother and pigeonhole her creativity into a single obliterative force. Here, poetry fights back.

In the prose poem “After/birth,” Malhotra writes about the implantation of a newly fertilized egg in the mother’s womb and the formation of the placenta: “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.” In fighting back, the mother-poet is not only working to ensure her child’s survival, but her own. The mother creates the child, yes, but the mother also creates the mother.

The poems in Mothersalt embody diverse forms, from erasure to prose to dictionary entry. In one of the book’s most powerful and ecstatic passages, from the serial titular poem “Mothersalt,” the delineation between reality and metaphor blurs:

I wake with a bullet between my teeth, grinning. The moon hangs in my hair like a flash of lightning. I am the body fantastic, dripping with silver and night sweats. Come near, come near. I am swollen with the bounty of fall. I crackle, I charge. My hair rises from the roots. Muscles lit with fire, I throw my big-bellied challenge to the sky.

Here Malhotra fights to reclaim the birth story by reimagining the utilities of the very language we use to tell it.

There are more serial poems in Mothersalt, such as “Dear Body—” and, I would argue, the “On” series, in which prose poems meditate on the curious phenomena of early motherhood: the aforementioned “On Mothering” as well as “On Gestation and Becoming,” “On Bewilderment,” “On Weaning,” etc. The collection’s recursiveness, like in “Today,” has a simultaneously collapsing and multiplying effect on time that is true to the postpartum experience. In “On Memory,” the speaker tells her daughter, now old enough to converse, about her birth:

You were blue, I say. The umbilical cord was wrapped around your neck. They took you away, and then they brought you back.

Her face fills with questions, like water running into a glass. Why did they take me away? Where did I go? How long until they brought me back?

With this telling, I am weaving her an origin story—one, I realize, in which I am incidental.

The birthing story in which the mother is merely incidental is one where the baby is not just more important than the mother, but where the mother—and her labor—is erased. It is the story this collection mightily resists, despite the fact that, as Malhotra writes in “On Ambivalence,” children “belong only to themselves.” The mother is erased not just by patriarchal palimpsest, but by time. Every today puts more and more distance between the birth and the present, between the mother’s body and her child’s.

Mothersalt insists on telling the story of the mother’s labor in the birth story, on the story of the mother who creates herself, despite every imposed impossibility. How exciting to see another fantastic poetry collection about early motherhood amid other recent company: Leila Chatti’s forthcoming Wildness Before Something Sublime, Elizabeth Metzger’s Lying In, Lisa Ampleman’s Mom in Space, Rachel Richardson’s Smother, Nancy Reddy’s Pocket Universe, Sarah Vap’s Winter: Effulgences and Devotions, and Rosalie Moffett’s Making a Living, to name a few. Together these mother-poets impart the primacy of the birth story in our culture as the story of the birth of the mother, and of all the new life—the mother’s—that happens after.