I Would Define the Sun

Poems

Stephanie Niu (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

72 Seiten

2025
Vanderbilt University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8265-0771-6 (ISBN)

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A poetic exploration of what love does across vast distances, whether of language and immigration, ecological ruin, or longing

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.

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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	17.01.2025
Reihe/Serie	Vanderbilt University Literary Prize
Vorwort	Major Jackson
Verlagsort	Tennessee
Sprache	englisch
Maße	140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-8265-0771-9 / 0826507719
ISBN-13	978-0-8265-0771-6 / 9780826507716
Zustand	Neuware