Write dirty words

Another Way to Split Water is filled with the shapeshifting bodies of land, water and woman:  bodies of blood and myth, bequest and second sight. While Pirmohamed interrogates the place of woman as migrant, daughter and lover, the caveats of ‘another’, ‘after’, and ‘elsewhere’ fill the collection, denying the singular, linear narratives that have defined these identities, and our relationship to them, for so long.

Part I speaks both to a pervasive sense of want, ‘lately, I read about storms all night / because there is no lightning here’ (‘Meditation While Plaiting My Hair’) and, significantly, the uncertainty that follows the fulfilment of want, through the ‘stammer of lightning’ in ‘Nights / Flatline’. The poems trace a speaker desperate to understand her individual self ‘I titled another page with my body / and sundered every bending, splitting line of myself / to the making’ (‘Hinge’) before the revelation that hers are inherent, and inherited, divisions:

but one day I’ll split into myth

and pass through the mouths of a hundred generations.
I am woman after woman after spooling

woman […]
(‘The Fish that Halved Water’)

In poems such as ‘After the House of Wisdom’, the speaker pulls these external, fractured states inwards, becoming their source rather than their outcome:

Perhaps it is the other way around, small
rivers uncoiling into ink on this version
of my eyes. So, I rinse in a bath of citations,
[…]
unfolding my spine in one long extended verse.

This new perspective brings forth the declaration ‘This is me, ...