Another Way to Split Water

Alycia Pirmohamed

Image | Another Way to Split Water

(Birlinn Ltd.)

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.
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. (From Birlinn Ltd.)
Another Way To Split Water features the collection of poems that won the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize: Love Poem With Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih.
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the chapbooks 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 currently teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia has held post-doctoral positions at the University of 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.