Sundress Reads: Review of Another Way to Split Water

Another Way to Split Water (YesYes Books, 2022) is the first full-length poetry collection by Canadian-born, Scotland-based poet Alycia Pirmohamed, but reads as if it could be her fourth or fifth. The writing is self-assured, mature, and has a clear vision; for a collection so concerned with splitting, halving, and parting, it’s one of the most cohesive collections of poetry I have read in recent years. Anytime I thought a poem had abandoned the central themes, the writing would soon reveal itself to be yet another bejeweled piece of the overall stunning mosaic. Though the poetry is ever shifting and changing, like the many rivers we encounter throughout Another Way to Split Water, Pirmohamed’s vision always remains simultaneously fixed in place.

The first half of the collection is abstract and ethereal, with poems that behave like meandering whirlpools. The imagery floats in and out of realms that are mine to realms that are not mine, from tangible and empirical realms to thoughts only heard between dreams. Images of “stippled moons,” “glaucous blooms,” and an array of ghosts weave in and out of Pirmohamed’s poetry like creatures rustling along the tree line, in a way unseen but fully known by the music of their presence.

Nature is an ever-present character throughout both halves of the collection, with Pirmohamed effortlessly shifting between mystic and scientist. She deftly demonstrates that not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary for one to see the world from both perspectives if they are to ever make anything out of the inscrutable image that being human presents us with.

A good example can be found in two poems that appear next to one another in the collection: “I Want the Kind of Permanence in a Birdwatcher’s Catalogue” and “Hinge.” In the former, Pirmohamed speaks of reading her morning prayers off of her cracked phone screen, and the crack splitting the text, “Forgi/ve me” (11). This experience of fragmentation sends her to “an alternate universe/a parallel world,” where she begins to feel as fragmented as the text on her screen; when she finally roots herself back upon the earth she desires

Like the ornithologists that have blessed the birds with their “official” names, locked away in a dead language, the poet yearns for that same legacy, one that’s all the more ironic given the way all languages change overtime, forever shifting like rivers. In “Hinge,” Pirmohamed writes, “I want to lean my neck toward/a thing until I, too, become ism,/scientific and named into truth” (12). In fact, there’s a large effort currently going on to rename many species of birds due to the history surrounding their names—no ink is indelible, and no category is an island. Fully aware of this, Pirmohamed effortlessly flows from “bismillah” to “phototropism” in the span of a few lines, demonstrating how it’s all part of the same tapestry.

In a later poem, “House of Prayer” Pirmohamed writes, “Alhamdulillah glints beyond language” (67)—this is exactly what I believe the poet is striving for as well, to write in a manner that “glints beyond language,” beyond the very building blocks that facilitate the idea in the first place. Islamic imagery permeates the text but at no time feels overly religious or preachy. Instead, Pirmohamed taps into the mysticism present in all forms of religion, in all forms of hope. Her knowledge of the natural world is deeply impressive, and she never shies away from using names and terms that few encounter outside of a textbook, yet it never feels stuffy or over intellectual. She conjures the impossible by manipulating layers of complexity into forms that are somehow both easily recognizable and completely novel.

Entering the second half of the collection is a bit like going over a waterfall: we’re still on the same river but the current feels different. Suddenly the poetry becomes more immediate, more intense. To start the section, “Welcome” begins as if addressing the reader: “You know better than to feel welcome at anything resembling a border” (Pirmohamed 47). From here, the journey begins to feel more personal; the mystical imagery and references to nature are still present but things are more grounded and as a result, more consequential. This wonderful shift in atmosphere does a terrific job pacing of the book. Every poem, every word in this collection, feels absolutely necessary.

The ending of Another Way to Split Water resembles the closing of a loop, resembles a river split, halved, then curved to be made whole anew. Primohamed provides another way to think about how we as individuals fit into this river, each of us a drop, particles behaving as a wave; even when we split, we fall back into a single body.

This is a collection that deserves multiple reads and is sure to reward you in multiple ways. This is a collection that deserves to be meditated on, poured over like the poet’s own morning prayers. This is a collection that I could easily write another thousand words on, but in short, this is a collection that deserves a place on your bookshelf.   

Another Way to Split Water is available from YesYes Books

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By all accounts Ada Wofford is a witch, that’s according to an NPR poll surveying their neighbors (it was never aired due to runtime). They’ve earned advanced degrees in Literature and Library Magic from Rochester and Wisconsin respectively, though they refuse to rest on such pedestrian laurels. They catalog rare books and the such at Between the Covers Rare Books, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in several places such as Autostraddle, The Blue Nib, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and their chapbook I Remember Learning How to Dive was published in 2020 and earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination. Lastly, some people say that they’re the one who actually wrote the YA novel Loops of Willow available at Losgann Press. When away from their books, Ada can be found divining bottle caps and attending to their paper garden.