Emily Sun’s debut poetry collection Vociferate | 詠 crackles with warmth, wit, and searing insight. Memories and languages – English, Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin, French, Japanese, Latin – mingle across its pages, forming unexpected, incisive moments of intercultural exchange (‘Go home / 回家 / 回国 / au revoir’). These moments are as playful and intimate as they are politically potent. Vociferate makes clever work of every breath; drawing sharply into focus the grief and indignation cleaved into individuals and communities haunted by imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, orientalism. There is a restlessness to Sun’s dynamic pursuit, questioning our desire to ‘privilege the light / even though it’s the sun that burns’ and wryly reminding us that ‘identity is malleable / do you have the luxury of fate?’. In the same stroke, Vociferate touches its reader with its tenderness and sparkling sense of humour, punctuated by inside jokes and a mischievous love for the irreverent.