Another Way to Split Water

Another Way to Split Water is the debut collection from Edwin Morgan Poetry Award winner Alycia Pirmohamed. This collection employs figurations of the natural world to reflect on themes of language, distance, migration, belonging, faith, grief, and intimacy. 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