Vociferate
NSW Premier’s Literary Prize (2022)Shortlisted
WA Premier’s Book Award (2022)Australian Book Review Books of the Year (2021)
‘Ranging across continents, cultures and languages, Vociferate is a bold poetic venture, grounded in the multiple and the eclectic, from classical music to popular film, from literature through ordinary suburban living. No subject, no assumption, is left untouched by Emily Sun’s ironic, questing visions. She is a genuinely new and distinctive presence in Australian poetry.’
‘Every poem here is like a little grenade, sometimes filled with sizzling rage, sometimes wry humour, but always with expansive wit and erudition. Vociferate is polemical, personal and political. Be prepared to be blown away!’
‘She’s the ‘Wandering Minstrel in Translation’ … This is Australian poetry too, with suburban settings providing material for many of the scenarios, though Australia can never simply be home. Place is layered and unstable, as fractured as the language that speaks.’
‘Read this book from beginning to end, and then read it again, for all the things that aren’t declared until you understand its accomplished means of making the poem in itself, and the poem that keeps on speaking and growing.’
‘These poems hit like sharp little bullets.’
‘Emily Sun’s cultural-presumption-shredding Vociferate | 詠.’
— John Kinsella – ABR Books of the Year
‘Vociferate touches its reader with its tenderness and sparkling sense of humour,punctuated by inside jokes and a mischievous love for the irreverent.’
‘Emily Sun traverses continents and cultures in a daring poetic venture. History, philosophy, religion, popular culture — nothing is left untouched in a critical pursuit of the politics of identity and belonging, and how we are haunted by the legacy of colonialism. Sun’s poems are sometimes delivered with sizzling rage, sometimes with sparkling humour, but always with formidable intelligence.’
— WA Premier’s Book Award Judges
‘There is a quiet rage in the poems as well as a terrible beauty.. We hear so many anodyne accounts of how the world is, but what if the world was exactly how it appears in these poems? Broken, writhing, and electric.’