Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s ‘Isako Isako’ weaves lives of generations of Asian-American women into poetry

In Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poems, memories of childhood and old age merge in powerful ways. War, displacement, birth and death run like leitmotifs through her debut collection, “Isako Isako” (Alice James Books, $15.95, 100 pages), with each poem giving voice to women’s experiences.

In a family lineage spanning multiple generations, Malhotra draws on memories of her childhood years in Thailand and Laos. But the book’s central figure is Isako, an amalgamated character Malhotra created from letters in the names of both of her late Japanese grandmothers. Many of the poems in this haunting collection recount experiences related to her by the two older women. Others are drawn from stories passed down from Malhotra’s greatgrandmother.

“As I wrote these poems, I’d realize ‘in this poem, I’m writing about my grandmother.’ In another, I was writing about my dad’s mom or my mom’s mom. Or it was me, in this encounter with what it means to be in this line,” Malhotra said over tea recently in San Francisco. “But I didn’t want to say ‘my grandmother, my grandmother,’ over and over. I wanted her to sort of stand on her own. As I was writing the poems, I realized this character can be big enough, expansive enough, that I can attribute all these different women’s lives to her. She’s kind of this category of female experience.”

Some of the collection’s most affecting poems deal with World War II and the experience of JapaneseAmericans in internment camps across the West. Malhotra’s grandmothers often spoke and wrote to her about their experiences.

“It’s what it looks like to try to understand World War II from a family that was partially in Japan during the conflict and then partially in internment camps on the other side of the Pacific,” she said.

One of the poems, “Isako Like Ash Your Sister Drifts Back to You,” is based on her maternal grandmother’s memories of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.

“I can still picture what she looked like as she was telling me these wartime experiences,” Malhotra said. “They were from a lifetime ago, but she talked about those experiences as if they were yesterday. It was such a vivid listening experience, and I think some of that translates onto the page. I wanted to capture that overspill of generational memory.”

Malhotra’s childhood emerges in striking imagery on the pages of “Isako Isako.” Born in Berkeley, she spent most of a decade in Thailand and Laos with her parents, who worked for a faithbased humanitarian aid organization. She attended high school in Bangkok.