In Alycia Pirmohamed's debut collection 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.
In Alycia Pirmohamed’s first full-length collection, Another Way to Split Water, figures split, double, and even shatter through inheritances of migration ... Pirmohamed simultaneously builds meditative poems of presence ... This collection’s most compelling lyricism rests in such moments, as with the poem 'Hinge,' which joins the physicality of the natural world.
Alycia Pirmohamed’s Another Way to Split Water is fluid, flowing through settings, explorations, emotions and questions with an ease that lures the reader to dive in without hesitation ... The collection is itself an act of creation and recreation, acknowledging change over time ... The collection reflects on ideas of belonging, faith and more, offering intimate insight and ponderings of bigger questions through the vivid landscapes that lay backdrop. Memory is explored – sometimes with the heft of the past, others with regret – each with a tenderness and care ... 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.
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. While she seems most at home with couplets, she masters a range of forms. Language is well chosen, rarely ostentatious, though, on several occasions, nouns turn into verbs ... These are poems for a global age, where we move between cultures with apparent ease and might have several lands – or none – which we call home.
