Shorelines

by Alycia Pirmohamed

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.

Reviews of Shorelines

'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