Join us at Other Books for Mia Ayumi Malhotra's poetry book launch of ISAKO ISAKO with Kenji C. Liu. RSVP on Facebook on here!

Publisher's Weekly had this to say about ISAKO ISAKO:

“Behind barbed wire all question run to one,” writes Malhotra in a chilling debut based on the linked lives of four generations of Japanese and Japanese-American women. Documents and firsthand accounts of state-sanctioned terror ground the poet’s deeply personal inquiry. Opening with a reproduction of the U.S. Army evacuation instructions to “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien” in San Francisco on May 3, 1942, the book is haunted by wars in Japan and Vietnam. . . . By turns delicate and anguished, the poems ask how one can recover—and recover from—experiences that are not one’s own. Donning an ancestor’s kimono a single time, Malhotra acknowledges its strangeness: “I rewrap the garment believing a new/ grammar may be necessary.”

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a fourth-generation Japanese American and the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, Best New Poets, and DISMANTLE: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. She currently lives in the Bay Area.

Kenji C. Liu is author of Monsters I Have Been, forthcoming from Alice James Books (2019), and Map of an Onion, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. His poetry is in American Poetry Review, Action Yes!, Anomalous, Split This Rock’s poem of the week series, several anthologies, and two chapbooks, Craters: A Field Guide (2017) and You Left Without Your Shoes (2009). A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of VONA/Voices, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in Los Angeles.