Near the end of Notes from the Birth Year, Mia Ayumi Malhotra asks a question I cannot get out of my head: what is the difference between a ghost and an ancestor? In its exquisite record and retelling of the ways we behold the world and of the ways we share that beholding with others, Malhotra’s intimate and spellbinding poetry illuminates love as attention shared and attention transferred, while creating, in that illumination, space for the ghost and the ancestor to exist, in their differences, together— in the living, in the dying, and in the beholding. —Brandon Shimoda
Near the end of Notes from the Birth Year, Mia Ayumi Malhotra asks a question I cannot get out of my head: what is the difference between a ghost and an ancestor? In its exquisite record and retelling of the ways we behold the world and of the ways we share that beholding with others, Malhotra’s intimate and spellbinding poetry illuminates love as attention shared and attention transferred, while creating, in that illumination, space for the ghost and the ancestor to exist, in their differences, together— in the living, in the dying, and in the beholding. —Brandon Shimoda