Inter-genre Hybrid Poetry: Alycia Pirmohamed's #LighthouseTakeOver

For Independent Bookshop Week, we invited some of our author pals, local and from further afield, to take over our Instagram account for an hour, recommending books on a chosen theme or in a chosen genre. In case you missed, we’ve published a list of each author’s chosen books (alongside their own work!) here on the website.

We’re lucky to know some pretty splendid folk!

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of Another Way to Split Water, forthcoming with YesYes Books and Polygon Books in 2022. Her chapbooks include Hinge (ignition press), Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press), and the collaborative essay Second Memory, co-authored by Pratyusha (Guillemot Press and Baseline Press). Alycia is currently a postdoctoral fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh,and she previously studied creative writing at the University of Oregon and the University of Edinburgh. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Program. In 2020, she won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Find her online at alycia-pirmohamed.com and on twitter @a_pirmohamed.

Alycia recommends:

States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya: States of the Body Produced by Love is a complex and magnetic collection. Ramayya interrogates language with care, with ferocity and tenderness and brings poetry and prose together in exhilarating ways.

Some Integrity by Padraig Regan: At the centre of Regan’s Some Integrity is the stunning hybrid piece ‘Glitch City;’ other poems include sensorial meditations on artistic practice and landscape.

Stone Fruit by Rebecca Perry: Stone Fruit begins with an evocative series of poems titled ‘beaches,’ which distort both time and place in intriguing ways, then closes on what reads almost like a memoir in verse about trampolining the limits of the body.

#Afterhours by Inua Ellams: Ellams’ #Afterhours is a moving dialogue between poet and archive; it’s a call and response, a reclamation, and a meditation on life all at once. Poems are paired with poetic replies and intimate reflections.

of sirens, body and faultlines by Nat Raha: Raha’s of sirens, body and faultlines is a thrilling, experimental, anti-capitalist composition that challenges ways of looking through play with syntax, space, and grammar.

Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris: Image and text come together in Garden Physic; Legris’ play with the poetic line is an invitation to think in different rhythms about our ecological encounters.

Do check out the lists recommended by the other authors taking part in our Indie Bookshop Week take-overs!