Winner, 2020 Pamet River Prize
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.