The 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award winner, Svetlana's debut poetry collection If Movement Was a Language is available now with Vagabond Press.
If Movement Was a Language straddles many divides: between cultures, languages, classes, dimensions, states of matter, and the real versus the imagined—or (mis)remembered. The collection features recurring motifs around duality and duplicity, as reflected in the words’ fluctuating form on the page and the elusive image of light glimmering across water.
Invasive like the chlorine that stains these poems, nostalgia is a heavy scent, woven through every line of the collection. And yet, even in the depths of reflection, If Movement Was a Language keeps its face turned always towards the surface, questioning the future and its possibility of various outcomes.
Anchored in the author’s lived reality, the collection is interested in what might have happened in an alternate dimension—perhaps one where her family aren’t immigrants, or where they speak the same language with equal fluency, or where her father achieves the lifelong dreams for which so much has been sacrificed.
‘... captivating in its evocations of swimming in literal and metaphorical terms, and in its characterisation of the complexities of a family life at once supportive and salutary. Each of the poems is striking as its own self-contained sigh and collectively they develop a powerful narrative arc mapped out in language that is fresh, lyrical, stylish and brave. The collection confronts ideas of displacement, mortality, human intimacy and self-knowledge in challenging and engaging terms.’
Judges of the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award
'Svetlana Sterlin’s début poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language (Vagabond), explores swimming – its rhythmic strokes and breathing – as spirited moments of liberation. The silence of being underwater is used to uncanny effect as Sterlin’s poems confront narratives of displacement and disappointment like a hard slap of water on the body.'
Cassandra Atherton for Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2024
'If Movement Was a Language is a triumph of a book, one that feels both immersive and expansive, immediate and approachable, timely and timeless. No doubt its lines will hover behind and ahead of me as I struggle and collapse into each lap.'
Tim Loveday for Our Culture Magazine
'The movement of the book feels to me quite circular, in the best way...revisiting certain primal scenes...that, as they recur, pick up a kind of emotional inertia, stirring the reader into these increasingly powerful currents of feeling (‘recur’ and ‘current’ share, neatly, an etymological root)...'
Joel Keith for Voiceworks
'Sterlin navigates the delicate space between memory and the passage of time, capturing the tension of being young enough to feel the weight of past experiences yet beginning to distance herself from them. Her work has a quiet unease as she reflects on the deceit of time – how it distorts memory...This collection will resonate deeply with anyone who has struggled with finding their sense of place in a foreign world...'
Elaine Chennatt for Aniko Press
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Poetry | Prose
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LITERARY EDITING
MEDIA
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Aniko Press Book Review: If Movement Was a Language by Elaine Chennatt
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Book Review: If Movement Was a Language by Tim Loveday
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Our Logan profile
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Chill Subs Interview
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Aniko Press Indie Editors Series Interview
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Spineless Wonders: Meet the Slinkies Interview
SCREENWRITING
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Screen Australia family comedy: Farts & Fairies
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Queensland Writers Centre Fishbowl Residency
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Screen Queensland's Writers Write series lab
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Screen Queensland Notetaking Workshop
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Screen Queensland fellow at Stowe Story Labs October 2021 Retreat