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

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'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'

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'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'

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'An extraordinary collection... it's one that I'm very much looking forward to returning to'

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'Another Way to Split Water is an homage to family, the natural world, and storytelling'

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'[a] lyrical exploration of stories told and retold, ancestral memories reformed and transformed, and the imagined and reimagined'

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'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.'

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'The poems in this book draw you in with their incredibly vivid imagery of wilderness and water'

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'Alycia Pirmohamed's Another Way to Split Water is affecting, refined, and elusive in its invocations of environmentalism, circumventing cliché through sprezzatura'

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'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'

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'Rich, vulnerable and multi-layered, the poems engage with the subject’s relation to water environments in a climactically and politically turbulent world'

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'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' 

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'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' 

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'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'