Another Way to Split Water

Alycia Pirmohamed

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Winner, 2020 Pamet River Prize

In Alycia Pirmohamed's debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman's body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place: the prairies and mountains of Alberta, Canada, the hills and gardens of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the coastlines of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. These poems are a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world.

Book Details

Publisher: YesYes Books
Publish Date: Nov 15th, 2022
Pages: 108
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.50in - 5.50in - 0.22in - 0.26lb
EAN: 9781936919918
Categories: • Women Authors

About the Author

Pirmohamed, Alycia: - ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. Her debut collection Another Way to Split Water was released internationally in 2022 by YesYes Books in the United States and Polygon Books in the UK. She is also the author of the pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind and the collaborative essay Second Memory, which was co-authored with Pratyusha. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Program, and she currently teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia has held post-doctoral positions at the University Edinburgh and at the University of Liverpool, and she received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, the 92Y Discovery Prize, the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Pirmohamed writes with a flow which is rarely interrupted. She has a fine ear for the musicality in words and knows exactly where a line should turn..."

- The Scotsman

"In Alycia Pirmohamed's first full-length collection, Another Way to Split Water, figures split, double, and even shatter through inheritances of migration: 'Even as a young girl, you found fragments / of the broken mirror that same country handed you.'"

- Rebecca Morgan Frank for Poetry Foundation

"Alycia Pirmohamed's astute and moving poems dwell in a longing that's a 'pattern embossed' on the skin. An intimacy with language is evident on each page: sonic-rich phrasing, imagery that leaps and soars, and an astonishing attentiveness to the line. Pirmohamed is an immensely gifted poet. Her first book is an opening, a marvel."

- Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

"In Alycia Pirmohamed's Another Way To Split Water, a reader gets to taste arrival before arrival, a form of tenderness that refracts: 'an inherited vanishing/through the slit of a dream.'"

-Bhanu Kapil

"This is how Another Way to Split Water moves, wending through ossuaries and great plains, making oxbow lakes of prayers and their origins, bifurcating desire and discovery til each word holds its own river. You will want to map the navigations of these poems. You will be compelled to orbit their magnetic and inimitable oscillations. Ravenous, I reach for the depths Pirmohamed has herein abseiled."

- Shivanee Ramlochan, author of Unkillable

"Alycia Pirmohamed's debut, Another Way to Split Water, is an electric, taut, and glimmering achievement: the poet conjures with clarity and intelligence a world that is marked by longing, loss, and lost lands. She splits and gathers water like hair, elegizing and praising relationships to mothers, lovers, and God, but ultimately, this is a love song to and a lament of the self, estranged and beautiful."

- Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage