Two 2024 Australian poetry collections from Vagabond Press, paired here because both explore the body as a site of memory, though they come at it from very different directions.

In ‘The Maker of Garlands’, Pooja Mittal Biswas writes tilted forward into race, migration, sexuality, gender, family, violence, all whilst the surrounding culture keeps trying to decide what they all mean, for you. Biswas’s poems are direct, bodily and confrontational, deft through inherited trauma, communal violence and assimilation, without sanding down the harder pills edges. 

Svetlana Sterlin’s ‘If Movement Was a Language’ turns instead to swimming, water and the disciplined body. Written from the perspective of a former swimmer and swimming coach, the collection uses pools, breath, repetition, buoyancy and bodily technique as ways of thinking through migration, family, language, memory and distance. The poems repeatedly move between physical motion and emotional dislocatio, the body knowing how to cross water even when language, geography and family history remain less obedient. The collection won the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award and was commended in the 2024 Anne Elder Award.

Together they make a very good little diptych. 

Vagabond Press, 2024. First editions. Paperbacks. Both appear very lightly handled, with minimal shelf wear; internally clean and unmarked. Near fine condition.