Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed

On Sunday, January 15 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society, Massy Books and Birlinn Ltd for the launch of Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water. This lyrical exploration offers stories told and retold, how ancestral memory reforms and transforms and the imagined and reimagined.

Joined by Isabella Wang, author of Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions) and poet ALHS, the three will offer meditations and a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place.

This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance. The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

The Book

Another Way to Split Water is Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection. In it, 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.

About The Author

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay Second Memory, which was co-authored with Pratyusha. Alycia has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of Liverpool, and she received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She currently teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Another Way to Split Water is her debut collection.

With Guest Readers

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is completing a double-major in English and World Literature at SFU. She is also a youth mentor with Vancouver Poetry House, and an Editor at Room magazine.

ALHS is a poet and critic. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, CV2, and the pagefiftyone press broadside series. She lives and writes on the unceded land of the Lək̓wəŋən peoples, where she studied at University of Victoria.