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 own 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 great-grandmother.

“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 explained over tea in a recent interview 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 collections’s most affecting poems deal with World War II and the experience of Japanese-Americans 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 book’s 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,” says Malhotra. “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 own childhood emerges in striking imagery on the pages of “Isako Isako” as well. Born in Berkeley, the author spent most of a decade in Thailand and Laos with her parents, who worked for a faith-based humanitarian aid organization. She attended high school in Bangkok.

“Those poems were where my story sort of fit in to the historical sweep,” she says. “At first, I didn’t understand how they related. But as I continued, I realized that this feeling of being an outsider related to my grandmothers’ histories. Even though we’re Asian-American, we were clearly not from there. I never spoke the language fluently, and we were very carefully watched as a Western family.”

Today Malhotra lives in San Mateo with her husband, who works as an engineer with Google, and their daughters, aged 2 and 4. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and an MFA from the University of Washington; after graduation, she spent several years in Seattle as an adjunct professor teaching writing courses to undergrads. That experience, she says, informs her poetry readings, which have attracted readers from the Japanese-American community, women’s studies groups and others. At one recent reading, she notes, there were four generations of Japanese-Americans.

Both of her daughters were born while she was writing “Isako Isako.” During the same period, both of her grandmothers died. “Their deaths sort of bookended the writing of the book,” she says. Lately, Malhotra has returned to lyric prose; her current writings deal with “pregnancy and childbirth – those transformations.”

“I think it’s an extremely exciting time to be a poet,” she says. “Where I sit in the poetry world, my work is connected to communities of color – Asian-American poets, refugee or immigrant histories, African-American poets innovating with tremendous language and performance. There’s a kind of political and social urgency, and the poets are rallying to speak.

“That’s why I’m excited to move on to the next project. What does it mean to be a woman of color and a mother raising little girls? Those feel like such important questions, and people today are talking about them and thinking them through in poetry.”

Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net.

AUTHOR EVENTS

7 p.m. Dec. 5, Bird & Beckett Books & Records, with Julia Bouwsma, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco

6 p.m. Dec. 7, book release party at The Ruby, with Rita Bullwinkel, Jennifer S. Cheng, R.O. Kwon, and others, 2507 Bryant St., San Francisco

EXCERPT

From “A Portrait of Isako in Wartime”

In camp, it’s said, they cut

gardens into Arkansas desert,

fixed rocks into the flat face

of the earth and irrigated

bean rows to feed their families.

Healthy vines appeared

where none should have

grown; tiny buds coaxed

from the earth, tendrils

that spooled runners

through dust.

When the order came

to pack up and return

home, the authorities found

every curtain drawn

shut. Every barrack

floor swept clean.