I Would Define the Sun: Poems (Vanderbilt University Literary Prize)

by Stephanie Niu

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.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2025

Reviews

[kaitlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always skeptical when people call books “essential” or “necessary” for the times…

this book is in fact essential and necessary for these current and insane times. Flew through this despite my attempts to go slowly. These poems are a mix of tiger balm + a new eye prescription. Cool on the skin and you can see leaves clearer afterward. Read read read

[b · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. there is a particular intimacy Niu creates through her oceanic poetics. i recognize how/why this book received the prize it did. Niu is confident and sharp. i do wish, however, that the form of some of these pieces felt more secure. in other words, there was a consistency in formal choice that i wish wasn't as consistent, and instead more exploratory. there were moments when the form wrote against the contents and meanings. it is true what Major Jackson says about Niu's masterful uses of the sestina, sonnet, abecedarian. it is also true, from Jackson's introduction, that Niu's poetics are collaborative with viewing the ocean from a bluff. beautiful stuff.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

love how unabashedly soft, moist, watery the poems are

favourite snippets:

“We begin in water, float through childhood. At times we cleave to live.”

- my mother says water dreams are auspicious
//

“As if the universe would not be much without us
to comprehend it back. We who praise

anything with hemispheres, a waist. Our soft, halved
brains. Our own split globe. So close to self

recognition it nearly frays.”

- by these things we live
//

and the entirety of the first poem - something magical about it. the absolute surrendering of a phytoplankton somersaulting through space/time, learning to love

[Hafsa | حفصہ · Rating 3 out of 5]

“In archaeology a trash heap is called a midden. / It means you've struck gold. What better map / to the way people lived than the things they discarded: / oysters shells, chicken bones, bits of green glass, / pickle forks, shoe leather miraculously intact. / The trash tells what they used, what they ate, / what they could not afford to throw away.” - Midden / Appetite

On self and nature, and on both when beautiful and when in crises.

FAV POEMS: My Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious, Midden / Appetite, Endeavour, Phenomenology Study / Elegy for Island Love, I Drive as My Family Sleeps, The Question, Motherhood in the Climate Crisis, Sea Swim.

[Sara Surani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephanie's "I Would Define the Sun" is the hug you get from a friend who really understands you. Her writing spans time, nature, and the magic of one's relationships with each other and the world around them. Her book leaves me longing for the ocean at the same time that it makes me feel seen by it.

[Tin · Rating 5 out of 5]

so behind on book recs but rlly liked this one
very much liked the bio references weaved throughout and the mentions of space
and especially the one poem that had the ORD mention (that poem also hit a soft spot in my heart)
it was so lovely to attend a live reading of these poems and even lovelier to spend time annotating my own copy <3

[DeeSoul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Niu's I Would Define the Sun is a reminder that our crises are compounding, not coincidental. And yet, in the midst of our crisis, we still dream. Of water. Of hummingbirds. Of bikes & jellyfish & shorelines. Niu's language is full of light and color, guiding across miles of landscape and history. A truly shining collection to add to the canon of ecopetics.

[Beatrice]

I had the sense that Niu wasn’t quite done baking yet, but I’ll be back for the next volume and hoping it’s a favorite.

[Omar Nema · Rating 5 out of 5]

first book of poetry i've ever read, really beautiful and approachable.

a line that stuck with me: "I wonder if we know how to be with each other without labor."