Isako Isako

by Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Isako Isako follows a single family lineage spanning four generations of female Japanese Americans to explore the chilling historical legacies of cultural trauma—internment, mass displacement and rampant racism—in the United States, and how it weaves together with current events.

“Isako Isako is a powerful testament to poetry’s capacity for alchemizing history, memoir, and the lyric: the poems here intimately address the landscapes of war and the reverberations of violence through bodies and bloodlines. Malhotra’s visionary debut collection spans generations, countries, and loves, weaving the story of a mother survivor with reflections on the limits and reaches of memory. Sandalwood cities, desert gardens, dragon skin, and peach pits emerge from a shadowed past, details that ‘elude / even as they’re remembered.’ ” —Brynn Saito

“The personal pronoun ‘I’ has brinks on all sides, over which you can fall and become anyone and no one. Isako Isako deeply explores these soaring and dangerous precipices of identity through the magnetic voice of a Japanese-American internment camp survivor who is both an individual and collective, a citizen and a prisoner, broken and healing. Mia Ayumi Malhotra has written a brilliant and searing debut.” —Maria Hummel

“Mia Malhotra labors in the mythic burdens and beauties of an ancestral story, delivering a vision that proliferates beyond the usual borders between generations, nations, or collective eras of psychic trauma. In these poems, haunted equally by historical events and the timelessness of human suffering, we find a stunning imagination at work on the sacred task of bodying forth, through an uncommon compassion, the stories that history might otherwise eclipse…” —Pimone Triplett

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2018

About the author

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a Kundiman Fellow, and her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and DISMANTLE: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and is a founding editor of Lantern Review. Isako Isako is her first book and will be published in September 2018 by Alice James Books. Currently, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.

Reviews

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

May you not fear what lies ahead.
May the moon's full face
light your own, milky
with tears. May it ferry you into mystery.
May your body, luminous
in its skin, so thin the bones
glow through, brim
with whispered prayers,
lacrimal and lesser wings.

The poems in Malhotra's "Isako Isako" are tied to her mixed Asian-American heritage--Japan, Laos, Thailand, the United States--and reverberate into internment camps, Hiroshima, Vietnam. Exploring her ancestry, she traces the threads of women's lives from country to country, culture to culture, generation to generation.

The poet does not shrink from the graphic horrors or war, of death and dying, of bombs, cancer, barbed wired fences, hate, hospitals, decay. What can be saved, held, passed on? Can we ever learn from either the present or the past?

We vanished without a trace.
Handprints in concrete, a pair
of house sparrows buried
in the front yard. How little
we leave behind. Feathers
on the bottom of a birdcage,
a cat found dead in a pool
of spilled petrol. A trick
of childhood, how details elude,
even as they're remembered.

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful collection! isako isako is a masterpiece. the poems are thick with imagery and metaphor without losing readability. the pacing of the over arching story is perfect. the beats of individual poems build and pull creating tension before releasing it. i’d recommend this book to anyone!!

[Madeleine Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, yet haunting poetry following four generations of Japanese women in a single family lineage as they carry the burdens of sickness, war, mass displacement, racism, and internment. Poetry of intergenerational trauma, and attempts to mend. Everything from poetry based on the Japanese Internment Order, to the bombing of Hiroshima. Altogether a comprehensive collection of pain and suffering that took quite a slow read to fully absorb its own magnitude but completely worth the rewards: lyricism, empathy, beauty, and recognition. Take your time, read this collection. I assure you, it's needed.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet but sad poems covering many experiences of Japanese Americans. I don't usually read poetry but I found these poems lyrical and moving.