Another Way to Split Water
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.
Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 and the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023
Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023, the Laurel Prize 2023 and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is 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 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. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.
