I Would Define the Sun: Poems [Paperback]

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026

Stephanie NiusI 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.

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