Description

WINNER OF THE NAN SHEPHERD PRIZE
A BOOKSELLER SPOTLIGHT PICK

‘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 travel 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.

Publisher Review

A truly original take on migration, family and faith — NOREEN MASUD, author of A FLAT PLACE Expansive, genre-defying — ‘Books Spotlight: Scotland’ * * Bookseller * * A book that earns its silences. Pirmohamed writes about belonging – in landscapes, in families, across borders – with a poet’s precision and genuine emotional courage. Shorelines is formally original and deeply true — FREYA BROMLEY, author of THE TIDAL YEAR 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 Shorelines is written with such care and attention, deftly interweaving histories that are personal, colonial and natural into reflections on family, loss and the shape-shifting nature of who we were, are and will become. In Shorelines we see Pirmohamed’s poetic sensibility applied to prose, and to ideas that connect us all — AMANDA THOMSON, author of BELONGING In this special book, land meets water, family history meets the world and memory meets memoir. Alycia Pirmohamed breaks with conventions of the nature writing genre to carve out her own way of writing the world around her, and what she creates is intimate, subversive and tenderly reflective — KATIE GOH, author of FOREIGN FRUIT Shorelines brims full of vulnerability and sacred insight. Pirmohamed is fearless in her experimentation and the questions she seeks to answer. Her approach to nature writing is not easily defined, it exists somewhere in the ocean, the earth, the sky. It hums with ancestral knowledge, a poet’s voice and the wisdom of the natural world. There Pirmohamed has found what it means to remember, to honour the past, and thus, what it is to survive — ANDRES N. ORDORICA, author of HOW WE NAMED THE STARS 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