Reading If Movement Was a Language by Svetlana Sterlin feels like drifting in a pool that is calm on the surface but hides an undercurrent that pulls you beneath the water. It’s much more than a poetry collection; it’s a quiet, aching memoir in fragments, perfectly dressed as poems.
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 kind of writing that doesn’t scream its meaning but lets it rise to the surface slowly, like a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
This poetry collection is an attempt to blend themes of displacement, identity, and familial relationships through the lens of swimming. Divided into five sections: ‘Foreign, Odd, Alien, Redundant and Stagnant, this book dives into components of the immigrant experience and the search for belonging. This structural choice resonates with the progression of an immigrant’s journey, from initial estrangement to eventual stagnation.
There’s water everywhere in this book from chlorine-slick pool tiles to rainstorms, and rivers of memory, it’s more than just a recurring image. It becomes a language of its own, speaking to grief, cultural displacement, family, and identity. It’s the kind of collection you read once, think you’re fine, and then feel it echo days later while standing in a grocery store or looking out of a bus window.
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.
Here’s the only gripe, it gets too quiet. A few poems feel like sketches of ideas rather than complete thoughts. As someone who loves poetry with bite, I occasionally found myself wanting a little more grit and confrontation, more tension to cut through the stillness. There’s beauty in restraint, sure, but a few moments left me drifting instead of diving deeper.
That said, Sterlin’s restraint is intentional, and for the most part, it works. She doesn’t give us polished narratives or perfect metaphors. She gives us moments in a locker room, a half-empty Russian supermarket or a broken conversation. Yet it all sticks together like wet hair on skin. It feels uncomfortably intimate and almost impossible to shake off.
For anyone who’s ever felt foreign in their own home, in their own body, or even in their memories, this one’s going to hit hard (in the softest way possible).
My Favorites:
Grieve Road pg 60 (‘sometimes I imagine how thin my voice would sound if I spoke my love out loud’)
Lack of culture pg 68
Damages pg 77
