1 October 2022
Unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən land
Dear Poemgranates,
So often my language is brought to its knees — a swift singe of parting or a magnolia branch extending its hand and I am fumbling. I would want to lean over to a friend and say I am longing for a bright moment beneath a willow but none of those words are it, save, perhaps, the willow. In “Self-Portrait as a Lost Language,” Alycia Pirmohamed writes “my tongue is a sieve.” And my language is brought to its knees.
Alycia’s debut Another Way To Split Water has led me to cliffs and rivers and forests of elk, easy as a recurring dream, and away from rummaging for words. Instead I am witness to reflection upon frozen lakes, upon gaps in bloodlines. I am witness as Hawwa “kisses each face // she finds in the river.” These poems sway in their adjectives, dizzying and of oneiric perception. A “glaucous bloom” or “episodic ghosts” or the “pining lengths” shift and hypallage and curdle for incisive questions: “tell me, when / did I let us splinter?”
I cherish these poems. I cherish these poems just as I cherish writing alongside Alycia, just as I cherish being a friend. In these poems I muster the gentleness to say this, as Alycia says of a winged boat clicking, “must be the prosody of my own desires.” In “Hinge”, Alycia writes, “The only time these hands have ever flowered, // have ever been used for something good, / was that spring at Yamnuska, where we found a clear / blue door of glacial water, and I walked right through / your reflection.” I surrender my stealth as a reader to these beams of refracted light.
Ever yours,
ALHS
Another Way To Split Water is published in Canada by Polygon Books.
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