ABOUT THIS BOOK

Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Expansive in scope, Niu refits the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” propelling readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance (winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, and Ecotone Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for research on Christmas Island’s labor history, through which she led youth poetry workshops and published the zine Our Island, Our Future. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

REVIEWS

"In 'The World’s Heart,' Niu writes: 'If I sliced the world open/ just below the gills, I’d find another fish/ inside, scarlet and going still.' When I opened I Would Define the Sun, out spilled salt, time, language, heartache, and seawater. This debut is a scarlet, beautiful, beating muscle: I’m so glad to have glimpsed it."
—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude— -

"Stephanie Niu would define the sun. With her finger, she would draw a circle around your heart to define inside and outside, and then she would draw that circle bigger. And your heart grows. She would point to the world and say 'World,' and then she would draw an 'X' on your soul and say, 'Here,' to remind you of the best seat from which to view the world. Love and Death are her masters, and she is one of their brightest, most diligent disciples. We are blessed to have these poems."
—Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling— -

"I Would Define the Sun offers both a realist and surrealist angle on its subjects: the depredations of climate change, consumerism, and the experience of living in two cultures: the Chinese one of her ancestry and the contemporary America she calls home. Niu has a sense of humor about the peculiarities of our age, and demonstrates an elegant sense of form in every poem."
—Dana Levin, Prize Jurist— -

"In 'The World’s Heart,' Niu writes: 'If I sliced the world open/ just below the gills, I’d find another fish/ inside, scarlet and going still.' When I opened I Would Define the Sun, out spilled salt, time, language, heartache, and seawater. This debut is a scarlet, beautiful, beating muscle: I’m so glad to have glimpsed it."
—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude— -

"Stephanie Niu would define the sun. With her finger, she would draw a circle around your heart to define inside and outside, and then she would draw that circle bigger. And your heart grows. She would point to the world and say 'World,' and then she would draw an 'X' on your soul and say, 'Here,' to remind you of the best seat from which to view the world. Love and Death are her masters, and she is one of their brightest, most diligent disciples. We are blessed to have these poems."
—Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling— -

"I Would Define the Sun offers both a realist and surrealist angle on its subjects: the depredations of climate change, consumerism, and the experience of living in two cultures: the Chinese one of her ancestry and the contemporary America she calls home. Niu has a sense of humor about the peculiarities of our age, and demonstrates an elegant sense of form in every poem."
—Dana Levin, Prize Jurist— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

If Words Cost Nothing

I
After Eden
The World’s Heart
Learning Money in Reverse
Information Worker at the End of the World
What do coral even get stressed about?
Hymn
My Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious
I Crossed the Sea Boardwalk

II
Christmas Island
Garbage Boogie
Midden / Appetite
Sonnet of Tropical Excess
Keeping House
Hummingbirds
Hilton Head
By These Things We Live

III
Endeavour
Abecedarian for Pinyin
Study in Blue
兰
While Peering in the Mirror
One Blue Sound
Missing You
青
The Road from the Mountains

IV
Before Desire
Lake Lanier
The Ocean in Miniature
Leaving Lisbon
Recurring Dream of Escape
He Sleeps
She Has Dreamt Again of Water
Returning To The Village
I Met My Loneliness
I Drive As My Family Sleeps

V
老家
The Question
The Magic of Eating Garbage
Bracing Myself Against Sea Wind Along the Coast You Call Home
Migration
Today Is
Motherhood in the Climate Crisis
Sea Swim

Coda
大连 / Dalian

Notes
Acknowledgments