Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Cover Art: "Honesty" by Caroline Hodgson
Indigo Moth Botanical Prints
Author photo: Timothy Phillips
$18 | ISBN: 978-1-936919-91-8
Poetry l Perfectbound | Nov 15, 2022
Praise for Another Way to Split Water
“Alycia Pirmohamed’s astute and moving poems dwell in a longing that’s a ‘pattern embossed’ on the skin. She transfigures yearning into intimacies with family, Canadian prairies, and rain that ‘knows how to fall in Gujarati.’ 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, Guillotine
"What is the shape of a lost country? What fills that shape, like water? Cross a body of water towards home. No, away from home. It's not possible, mid-image, pre-scene, to say which direction this water is flowing towards. 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.' Or: 'Inward' + 'burgeon' = 'loving what I can'? These are the questions the book emanates, perhaps, each time it's opened in a café, or on a plane." —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, 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: the poet guides us through wisdoms on 'how a landscape can break a body,' keenly aware that 'inheritance is a form of second sight.' There are lines so beautiful it almost hurts to read them––here is an incredible new voice, allowing us to listen to her tender song." ––Aria Aber
Another Way to Split Water
Available Now!
Winner, 2020 Pamet River Prize
Finalist, Raymond Souster Award for Poetry
"In Alycia Pirmohamed’s first full-length collection, Another Way to Split Water, figures split, double, and even shatter through inheritances of migration..." reviewed by Rebecca Morgan Frank for Poetry Foundaton"Water flows, ripples or cascades into almost every poem in the first full collection by Alycia Pirmohamed, winner of the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize. It might be as a reflective surface, a prairie downpour, an ocean over which a Boeing aircraft carries migrating travellers to a new country. It also serves to remind us that poetry itself is fluid: the words take the shape of whatever vessel, whatever set of ideas the writer chooses." reviewed by Susan Mansfield for The Scotsman
About 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: 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.
About the Author
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.
