{"id":19476,"date":"2025-04-09T13:51:25","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=19476"},"modified":"2025-04-10T01:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T06:21:09","slug":"a-review-of-i-would-define-the-sun-by-stephanie-niu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/19476","title":{"rendered":"[]: A Review of I Would Define The Sun by Stephanie Niu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephanie Niu\u2019s debut collection, I Would Define the Sun<\/em>, brims with salt, sea-creature, and island desire. Niu, a Fulbright scholar who conducted research on the remote Christmas Island just south of Indonesia, constructs a speaker who is island-like herself, isolated by her desire and yet simultaneously surrounded by a depth and plenitude of oceanic life. In \u201cSonnet of Tropical Excess,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

Can our selves across time warn? I know mine can<\/p>\n

lure\u2014younger, I desired this island so strongly<\/p>\n

I carved a path that stayed clear for years.<\/p>\n

Even earlier, islandless, I was in love.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t know what I wanted more of.<\/p>\n

Niu\u2019s speaker is stranded in her longing, reminiscent of Bishop\u2019s \u201cCrusoe in England.\u201d Even when the speaker is on Christmas Island and her desire for the island is fulfilled, the desire for her faraway lover is made even sharper.<\/p>\n

Niu captures the everyday negotiations of island life: the limited food resources, the intimacy of shared living, and the encroachment of the wild in human spaces. Her poems, in their form and content, adopt an island economy. She is careful with her words, delivering lines with gorgeous precision that rely on their conciseness. The reality of island dynamics is also emphasized by her interest in waste. Garbage features more than once in the collection, not just as a symbol of lost resources, but as a source of new potential. Niu\u2019s garbage clangs with \u201cmusic\u201d and possibility. In \u201cThe Magic of Eating Garbage,\u201d the speaker describes how she will transform her rotting leftovers into \u201cgumbo, stir fry soup\u2014I want to feed my guests the magic of reuse.\u201d This \u201calchemy\u201d makes what was destined for the trash into something that tastes \u201cabundant,\u201d a skill that erupts not just from necessity and an environmentalist\u2019s perspective, but also one that requires the same reinvention as poetry itself.<\/p>\n

Making use of what others do not value\u2014eels, jellyfish, secondhand clothes\u2014therefore becomes the speaker\u2019s way to move away from desire, and the lack that it implies, into a measure of abundance. Hunger is reframed through sustenance and sustainability. Or, at least, the speaker aims to do so. But even in moments of the purest reciprocity and sharing, the speaker finds herself greedy, unsatisfied by what she is given, ever wanting more. In the poem \u201cChristmas Island,\u201d she describes in detail the fresh wahoo her host has fished for them to eat, their bodies cut into \u201cfirm chunks almost translucent.\u201d These are the same species of fish she swam alongside that very morning, \u201ctheir long bodies glinting like blades\u201d:<\/p>\n

I slice into the meat. I will eat this seared,<\/p>\n

with soy sauce and juice from the neighbor\u2019s<\/p>\n

calamansi tree. I imagine the chase,<\/p>\n

the long body twisting in evening light.<\/p>\n

The clear fins trembling in a truck bed.<\/p>\n

I taste the fish. I wish for more.<\/p>\n

The speaker consumes this animal, made delicious from the resources that immediately surround her. But it is not enough. The speaker desires something more, something else. The syntax of the poem makes us unsure whether there is any amount of fish that would satisfy this craving. Perhaps the speaker is really referencing her distant lover, or a different kind of fullness that only mainland capitalist culture can provide. Perhaps the island\u2019s geography offers a kind of detox from this overconsumption, a contrast that makes these indeterminate longings more acute in the absence of excess to disguise them. The speaker\u2019s honesty in these moments of desire are what power the collection\u2019s voice, and this is what allows readers to trust her as she leads us deeper into the poems\u2019 oceanic landscape.<\/p>\n

The speaker\u2019s relationship to Christmas Island is made more complicated by her inherent foreignness, a fact that, while it isn\u2019t an explicit topic of Niu\u2019s work, nuances how the collection navigates its sense of place. Christmas Island is the closest to a physical \u201chome\u201d the speaker renders, but it also a place in which she experiences a profound isolation and longing. Christmas Island is notably the location of Niu\u2019s research, which positions her as a Stanford-educated academic who lives alongside local life, a perpetual observer. The speaker therefore cannot take root in Christmas Island itself. In her search for self-definition, she turns outward to the ocean that surrounds it.<\/p>\n

The ocean in Niu\u2019s collection serves as a source of the self, a kind of mother which is related to the mothering of language as well as the speaker\u2019s own biological mother. In \u201cThe Ocean in Miniature,\u201d the speaker describes how the underwater world pressurizes words into new forms. The world of literary meaning gives way to the realities of environment:<\/p>\n

iiiiiiiiiiii<\/span>Here, the vastness<\/p>\n

of a word like depth <\/em>or death <\/em>or knowing<\/em><\/p>\n

becomes bowl sponge. Comb jelly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Things that fit in my palm.<\/p>\n

Underwater, where light wavers and gathers in uncertain pools, the world is somehow made more legible. The speaker longs to be submerged in the ocean\u2019s mystery, its capacity to hold so much in its murk. The ocean is as deep and clarifying as the self. This interest in non-land-based truth is seen elsewhere in other poetry collections, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil\u2019s Oceanic <\/em>(Copper Canyon Press, 2018). I Would Define The Sun <\/em>can even be situated within a larger exploding genre of Pacifica poetry which imagines the ocean as a source of decolonial knowledge. But Niu makes a further leap from the ocean as a mother of language to the ocean as a physical mother.<\/p>\n

Niu\u2019s musings on her maternal lineage are all expressed through a connection to water. In the beginning of the collection, in \u201cMy Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious,\u201d the speaker describes her mother\u2019s horrifying dream of a miscarriage and how this dream came true. Water dreams are an inverse of this, a symbol of luck, of birth. Information and meaning is transferred through this water, much like the act of mothering.<\/p>\n

Later in the collection, \u201c\u5170\u201d (l\u00e1n), tracks this maternal lineage through the speaker\u2019s grandmother. The poem is an ode to a particular shade of almost-blue, a not-quite blue, inspired by the sonic similarity the character shares to the actual word for \u201cblue\u201d in Chinese. The rough ocean of language between the speaker and her grandmother is difficult to traverse:<\/p>\n

The years my grandmother<\/p>\n

begged us to speak<\/p>\n

in her language. The color<\/p>\n

of a sky full of tropical storm.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

It rhymes but isn\u2019t right.<\/p>\n

Not blue, but the sound<\/p>\n

blue makes. The last sound<\/p>\n

in my grandmother\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

This blue is a sea-blue within the collection\u2019s oceanic image system, another moment in which language collapses into its environmental, genetic origins. The poem\u2019s conclusion hints at an imprecision of language that results from a loss of mother tongue, but that offers new possibilities for meaning-making. In the context of diaspora, Asian American life is often island-like itself. It can be a geographically isolated form of cultural meaning through which one is constantly negotiating one\u2019s relationship to the whole, to one\u2019s ancestors\u2019 country of origin.<\/p>\n

Niu does not offer a clear path out of the loss she feels\u2014of lover, of home, of language\u2014but she points to the generative nature of the desire these losses elicit, as in \u201c\u5170.\u201d The poem \u201cMy Mother Says Water Dreams Are Auspicious\u201d hypothesizes that images only \u201capproximate meaning.\u201d If so, the images of this debut collection form vibrant, complex approximations of island life, just as the poems contain a budding, pearlescent approximation of their speaker.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eliana Reeves<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephanie Niu\u2019s debut collection, I Would Define the Sun, brims with salt, sea-creature, and island desire. Niu, a Fulbright scholar who conducted research on the remote Christmas Island just south of Indonesia, constructs a speaker who is island-like herself, isolated by her desire and yet simultaneously surrounded by a depth and plenitude of oceanic life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[83,1],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-548","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19484,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19476\/revisions\/19484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}