I Would Define the Sun: Poems
Paperback
Series: Vanderbilt University Literary Prize
ISBN13: 9780826507716
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: Feb 18 2025
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.23 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026
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. Refitting the world into a size made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue, Niu propels readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.
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