​‘... 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

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'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.'

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Cassandra Atherton for Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2024

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'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.'

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Tim Loveday for Our Culture Magazine

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'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 ...'

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Joel Keith for Voiceworks

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'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...'

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Elaine Chennatt for Aniko Press

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'Sterlin, a former swimmer, writes with the kind of precision that only someone who has spent hours underwater could master. Every line is measured but potent...The poems move through girlhood and migration, through a father’s job loss and a grandmother’s death, without ever yelling for attention. They are unsettling but deeply familiar if you’ve ever known the feeling of being not quite anywhere.'

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Preet Bulchandani for QUT Glass