Shorelines
Memory, migration and the selves we become
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Canongate Books
Publishing:13th Aug '26
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 13th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
WINNER OF THE NAN SHEPHERD PRIZE
'A truly original take on migration, family and faith' NOREEN MASUD
As a young Muslim woman Alycia Pirmohamed grew up with her body as racialised and her faith as seemingly dangerous. Her affinity to the natural world - the mountains, elk and pines of her childhood - conflicted with feelings that she was unwelcome in these landscapes. By contrast, the stories of her parents' homeland - the monsoon winds, red clay roads and abundant korosho trees - felt painfully distant.
Across interrelated pieces that move from Midwestern Canada to East Africa, the Pacific Northwest to the British Isles, the award-winning poet traces the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands. She creatively resists the expectations of nature writing and memoir, at times choosing to withhold as much as she reveals.
Shorelines moves from lavender skies to lighthouses, from surefooted ideas to liminal spaces. It asks what it means to carry hidden histories across borders and generations - and how losing family can mean losing the place they are from too. Above all, it explores how place and identity intertwine, and how our choices, our actions and the ways we build community shape us into who we become.
A truly original take on migration, family and faith -- NOREEN MASUD, author of A FLAT PLACE
Shorelines fell over me like a wave pools around a body in water. Tender and quietly incisive, Pirmohamed's poetic prose makes visible sensations, meanings and forgotten inheritances in the aches and unexpected joys of migration. Here is nature writing alive in its attention to movement, to loss and to the ethics that shape our encounters with the world and one another -- JESSICA J. LEE, author of TURNING and DISPERSALS
An exquisite, immersive memoir of place and displacement, of caring and grieving and creativity, of selfhood and interconnectedness. Shorelines will transport you in its flow and hold you weightlessly in its lyric pools, in its reflections of the complexities of living a creative life, and finding a place in the tangled world. Beautiful, deep and shimmering with meaning, this is a book to dive into and soak in -- POLLY ATKIN, author of SOME OF US JUST FALL
A gorgeous book brimming with supple writing. The speaker's longing for what cannot be known is baked into the meditative, patient syntax. The tension of seemingly opposing forces living in the speaker's body, creates a new place, where identity, home, nature and desire can coexist, swirling in the wind, in the elegance and majesty of Pirmohamed's language, in the beauty of a "sob" -- VICTORIA CHANG, author of OBIT and WITH MY BACK TO THE WORLD
A book that renders lineage, whether ruptured, compromised or intact, the portal to somatic thought. This collection asks profound questions about families, institutions and kinship groups. Pirmohamed's response is composed with the sea always in mind: "An ocean lyric" that "drags" and "undulates" -- BHANU KAPIL, author of HOW TO WASH A HEART
Praise for Another Way to Split Water: 'Pirmohamed writes with a flow which is rarely interrupted * * Scotsman * *
An electric, taut and glimmering achievement -- ARIA ABER
Meditative and almost transcendent * * Wasafiri * *
- Winner of Nan Shepherd Prize 2023 (UK)
ISBN: 9781837262052
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages
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