Polygon Editor Edward Crossan has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Caro Clarke at Portobello Literary for Then the Lake Shifts, a new poetry collection by Alycia Pirmohamed, exploring migration, inheritance, spirituality and womanhood.

The second collection by award-winning poet Alycia Pirmohamed, Then the Lake Shifts is both tender and interrogative in its language, and simultaneously hopeful and subversive in its appraisal of climate collapse. It navigates themes of intergenerational knowledge, colonial displacement, selfhood, poetic tradition, queer desire, and womanhood.

In this collection, the forest guide looks just like the self, a brown woman slides across time and space to walk across, and birdsong echoes are affirmations of home and homeland.

Then the Lake Shifts is a collection that reflects on migration and womanhood. It considers the multiple journeys I have taken over my lifetime, travelling across different thresholds, boundaries, and borders, and asks how these crossings change us over time. In these poems, I navigate the processes of artmaking, archiving, and recovery; I find solace in figurations of the natural world and in reimagining fragmentary narratives. I’m beyond delighted and excited that this collection will be published by Polygon in the UK and YesYes Books in the US, and I can’t wait to share it with readers!’

–Alycia Pirmohamed

‘I’m thrilled Polygon have acquired Alycia Pirmohamed’s next poetry collection,’ says agent Caro Clarke, ‘Their poetry list goes from strength to strength with wide-ranging, astute and thoughtful commissioning and will build on the incredible success of Another Way to Split Water. This new collection goes deeper and more resonant along the path she has forged with her debut on themes of inheritance, womanhood, climate collapse and migration – it is tender, magical and inventive and I can’t wait for everyone to fall in love with Then the Lake Shifts.’

Polygon Editor Edward Crossan has also commented, stating, ‘Alycia Pirmohamed’s new collection is the perfect follow up to her elegant and extraordinarily beautiful debut Another Way to Split Water, which was received so warmly by readers and critics. Exploring themes of migration, identity and the natural world, Then the Lake Shifts is both tender and thoughtful. I’m thrilled to be working with Alycia on this collection, and I can’t wait to send it out in to the world.’

Then the Lake Shifts will be published in May 2027. 

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the debut poetry collection, Another Way to Split Water, which was published by Polygon (UK) and YesYes Books (US) in 2022. Her debut nonfiction book, Shorelines: Memory, migration, and the selves we become, won the Nan Shepherd Prize and is forthcoming with Canongate in 2026. Alycia is the recipient of several awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the CBC Poetry Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and in 2026, she was awarded the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Alycia is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, and she currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programme at the University of Cambridge.