Another Way to Split Water
by Alycia Pirmohamed
£6.99
- Paperback
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Poetry
Reviews
Pirmohamed writes with a flow which is rarely interrupted. She has a fine ear for the musicality in words and knows exactly where a line should turn
The Scotsman
Pirmohamed’s achievements speak for themselves ... each poem is crafted, each word perfectly placed, flowing into one another. Dreamlike, brimming with ideas, it’s a collection that engulfs you, invites you to read more, to discover new jewels on each read
The Skinny
In 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"
Bhanu Kapil
Pirmohamed is an immensely gifted poet
Eduardo C. Corral
An electric, taut, and glimmering achievement
Aria Aber
You will want to map the navigations of these poems. You will be compelled to orbit their magnetic and inimitable oscillations
Shivanee Ramlochan
[Another Way to Split Water] inspired me so much. So many things I will think about differently now, from nature to form
Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House
[Pirmohamed's] language flows in elegant, mysterious ways, telling tales of heritage, history and belonging.
Toni Velikova, Scottish Poetry Library
An extraordinary collection... it's one that I'm very much looking forward to returning to
Glass Bookshop Radio
Another Way to Split Water is an homage to family, the natural world, and storytelling
Room Magazine
[a] lyrical exploration of stories told and retold, ancestral memories reformed and transformed, and the imagined and reimagined
Massy Arts
Lyrical and achingly beautiful... Another Way to Split Water is shot through with love, beauty, and deeply tender moments that live on far beyond the page.
Gutter Magazine
The poems in this book draw you in with their incredibly vivid imagery of wilderness and water
Fourteen Poems magazine
Alycia Pirmohamed's Another Way to Split Water is affecting, refined, and elusive in its invocations of environmentalism, circumventing cliché through sprezzatura
Raymound Souster Award Panel (Shortlisted, 2023)
I'm both struck and charmed by the slow progressions of lyric observation and philosophical inquiry throughout... Another Way to Split Water
Rob McLellan
Pirmohamed’s writing evokes tender emotions within readers by bringing a voice to those who search for a sense of identity and belonging in multiple places at the same time ... To read her book is to give form to the unappeased diasporic yearning that we continue to come to terms with
Surging Tide Magazine
Rich, vulnerable and multi-layered, the poems engage with the subject’s relation to water environments in a climactically and politically turbulent world
Poetry School
A long love letter to not just water that takes a multitude of shapes, but also to grief, prayer, girlhood, wind, womanhood, Allah, elks, longing, and departures... The reader's bonding to these poems, in many moments, is meditative, and almost transcendent'
Wasafiri Magazine
Her narrative is dynamic, a vibrant act of creating, undoing, transforming, and becoming. As you move through the book, the cyclical images of nature, gentle ebb and flow of rivers, rise and fall of storms, reflections of childhood and ruminations on the future, contribute to an emblematic growth of character and voice'
Outcrop Poetry
Alycia Pirmohamed’s Another Way to Split Water is an exciting debut that explores connections between landscape, language and the body in a series of lyrical poems
The Saltire Society
About the Book
Winner of The List Festival Award for Best Rising Scottish Author.
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
The Author
Alycia Pirmohamed
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She won the Nan Shepherd Prize for her nonfiction debut Shorelines, forthcoming with Canongate in 2026. She is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water. In 2026, Alycia received the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship with Creative Scotland and DG Unlimited.
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