Stephanie Niu is still becoming. The author of I Would Define the Sun (Vanderbilt University, 2025), has traveled the globe in pursuit of knowledge and new perspectives. She ruminates over water and trash while dealing with the burden of heartache in her first full poetry collection, which won the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize.
Niu, a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia, 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 also recently appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone Magazine and other publications.
Huddled over plates of Yemeni food in a lively Brooklyn restaurant, Niu and I discussed recurring themes throughout her work, the distance between science and poetry, learning to empathize with our mothers, and how language—even a native tongue—is often full of surprises.
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The Rumpus: You’ve had a variety of jobs and disciplines that have led you here, to publishing I Would Define the Sun, haven’t you?
Stephanie Niu: I’m a poet, sometimes a researcher. By trade, I work in the tech industry, but my curiosity about different modes of knowing has led me to explore different career paths, the most recent of which include research and history. I traveled to Christmas Island, which appears in this collection. So, there are many ways to label the disciplines that I engage in.
Rumpus: What draws you to poetry, as an avenue of documentation and recounting truths? Is there any science to poetry? Is there poetry in science?
Niu: For me, poetry is the most long-lived practice of my life. It feels like hygiene: if I don’t do it, I feel bad or dirty. What has brought science into that rotation is a noticing technique that feels very beautiful: in the same way that words and sounds can rhyme, ideas and facts can also rhyme. I think science is a place where I’ve always found that to be true. The deeper you go into a specific idea or fact—like researching the way a deep-sea marine invertebrate operates and is able to survive its conditions—the more those facts feel intangible. The more I know, the more mysterious it is, the less I actually know. That feels very poetic. That, in itself, is a very true shape of the universe.
Rumpus: You play with language in the book, and your ability to tell us facts followed by a demonstration of the effects of those facts. For example, in the poem, “Endeavor,” you focus on “the words we use have what we need within them.” In that same poem, you play with Hanzi in talking about your mom’s search for familiar foods, a hint of home in a new land, to show how the character for moon, 月, is present in the characters for eye, 目, and look, 看.
Rumpus: Can you talk more about how your perception of Mandarin influences your poetic choices?
Niu: Technically, Mandarin was my first language. I spent a year in China [as an infant], and it’s where I learned to speak, but it doesn’t feel like my first language anymore. It’s less familiar to me.
I read a poem to a bilingual friend, whose first language is Mandarin, and she observed the leaps that I make between certain characters of Mandarin, and the fact that they’re composed of other words—an intentional part of the language—was very characteristic of a second-language speaker. I was drawn to the literal composition of the characters. Someone who speaks Mandarin, and uses it every single day, wouldn’t treat it that way because it’s so familiar. So, sometimes the relationships between words, like puns or lyricism, or how Chinese is composed of other words, stand out to me. They feel just unfamiliar enough to surprise me in a way that might not be so exciting if I was just using the language to operate in daily life.
Rumpus: Is it important to look at language in a new, focused, and intentional way? Possibly in a way that is inspirational?
Niu: Yes. There’s a naivete in my relationship to [Mandarin] that allows me to play with it more. A friend who was trying to teach me French remarked that when someone is learning a new language, they say sentences that they would never otherwise say, because it’s all they know how to say. Experiencing a new language is just so fun. It gets over your self-consciousness to say things like, “The sidewalk is nice today,” or “The sky is the color of your eyes,” and other sentences that aren’t very normal. Sometimes, I feel that same way with Mandarin although it’s familiar to me. It’s what my parents speak to me in the house, but I’m used to speaking English back to them, so we very much have a bilingual household and relationship. There’s still a little bit of unfamiliarity when I’m generating my own sentences in that language to where I can play with it and make these silly puns that a native speaker probably wouldn’t.
Rumpus: The collection’s title presents itself in the very first poem, “If Words Cost Nothing.” In it, the speaker muses on the possibility of defining the sun, if language would afford its poets, words are our craft supplies. Just how costly are words as our tools? What does it mean to be without them?
Niu: I was purposefully playing with the conditional sense, in that poem, and implying that the thing that follows is not necessarily true. I would define the sun if I could . . . but I can’t, thanks to the finite nature of language. It’s easy to feel like words are free; in many ways, words are the most abundant medium we have when you compare them to other artistic mediums, like paint. You have to buy paint, but you can type infinite words on your keyboard, on Twitter, and Instagram all day. We were having a conversation earlier about how language degrades there [on social media], and how it’s easy for words to lose their meaning or charge.
There’s a phrase that I read recently, “garbage language,” that refers to workplace talk. Phrases like “circle back” and “pull up” and “Q4 fiscal plan,”. . . all these refer to common concepts that feel somewhat empty or meaningless. That, to me, is what words cost—the meanings that they take on when used in a certain way. Those meanings, in turn, shape our thoughts. I think this happens very much with the media. For example, you can see how the media talks about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, by specifically erasing that word [genocide] or using the passive sense . . . not saying who’s doing the killing or inflicting the harm, just saying that that harm has happened without pointing to an actor. I think that although language is free and the act of putting it down feels free, it affects the way people think about and understand the world in a way that very much has material effects.
Rumpus: We certainly witness a tension between consumption and refuse. The speaker laments “I have trash guilt. I’m culpable.” Why is the poet so worried about consumption and waste?
Niu: Trash guilt, for me, feels both existential—living in a time of very imminent climate crisis, in this consumption culture, that’s very hard to break out of, without strong intention—and very personal. [I am] literally consuming vast quantities of food when I have parents who were very hungry growing up. I think my consumption guilt extends to this modern time, and there’s a generational gap or a distance I feel between me and my parents. There’s this guilt of the abundance that I have and what they gave up to afford me this abundance.
An idea that I explore through poetry is, “What makes something feel abundant and where to locate abundance.” I think it’s easy to get molded into a sense of scarcity, believing that consumption is the only answer. We often think we need to purchase more and more things. Even within patterns of consuming and wasting food, I do feel like there are moments where things feel abundant. In the poem, “The Magic of Eating Garbage,” my mom encourages me to eat things that would otherwise get thrown away. Although it’s coming from that culture of scarcity, it felt too freeing for me to think, “Oh, yeah, the things we need are actually everywhere.” Every day, things get thrown away, but you can scavenge what you need out of what already exists, instead of constantly having to consume and buy other things.
Rumpus: In this collection, the speaker spends quite a bit of time volleying between wanting to honor lessons learned in childhood, and experiencing shame for adult desires, which deviate from those early lessons. Did you find peace in the process of writing about that tension?
Niu: For a long time, I had this streak of resistance, where the more my mom wanted me to do something, the less I would want to do it, out of principle. Sometimes, resistance to the traditional way, or her way, felt like the thing that guided me. One thing that’s happened in my adult life, as I’ve aged, is understanding that part of bridging the gap between my wants and her wants is accepting how much I do love her. To be the person she’d like me to be, sometimes can be a healthy expression of love. I’ve struggled with this. How can I be who I am, and not let who she wants me to be corrupt or pollute that? I think the love [we] genuinely feel for one another serves as a bridge between those two things. It’s a troubled, shaky bridge at times, but one I want to know better. [I’m] on the path to accepting the fact that who I am is inevitably going to be a combination of these things.
Rumpus: How do the poems in this collection ask us to understand the dynamics between the mother and daughter, where the mother is an emblem of Chinese American immigrant tradition and frugality, in contrast to the daughter, who exudes a combination of freedom and self-loathing? What do the poems say about the two women: one of whom was born from the other?
Niu: The poems in the collection question the relationship between the mother character and the speaker by trying to look back to the point of origin. To what you ended on, the speaker is born of the mother, and that’s undeniable. There are a lot of things that the act of looking back includes—looking back to a mother tongue, trying to engage with Mandarin, which is kind of a first language but feels more foreign now, or considering the mother’s existence before the speaker was born. For example, in the poem, “Endeavor,” we see moments where the mother goes to try and buy soy sauce in Huntsville.
Especially in poetry, I think there’s more permission to exit the bounds of strict time and chronology. There’s space to go into the dream world and explore the way that the mother’s relationship to dreams affects the speaker’s own relationship to dreams, like in the poem, “My Mother Says Water Dreams are Auspicious.” I think in that and other poems, I was questioning the mother’s way of seeing the world and engaging with images in dreams, like the ocean, and seeing how those things trickle into who the speaker has become over time.
Rumpus: Why do you think you, and other poets, are so obsessed with these primordial fluids that birth us? What is it about the substance of origin that calls us to write and dream about it?
Niu: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. The essential mystery of water persists, no matter how deep you look. It’s the same way I feel sometimes about the scientific truth: the closer you look and the clearer the facts, the more mysterious it actually is. I write a lot about water, specifically about the ocean. I didn’t grow up around it though; I grew up around rivers and other freshwater bodies.
I’m fascinated by the physics of water, the tide, and the fact that it’s a force beholden to things that are outside of our planetary body. It feels almost like a connection outside of what we know as planet Earth. I like thinking about the oceanic layers- how the sun influences what types of life can exist at each layer while water is the medium that hosts life; of course, water being the fluid of our own lives, in a literal, biological sense. We’re connected to water and created from it. All these things make me think you can never fully understand the allure of water.
Rumpus: In talking about water, as a Georgian . . . I have to ask: What exactly are you doing swimming in Lake Lanier?!
Niu: The poem “Lake Lanier” is about realizing the truth of the lake. It was a place that we went to for church outings. “Lake Lanier,” the poem, is about our second or third time there. For a long time, Lake Lanier was synonymous with boating. I didn’t know the history of the site or that houses were never removed. So, I very much now understand and feel the spiritual sentiment around it.
Rumpus: It seems that the poet repeatedly chooses the pursuit of knowledge—of the self, of history, and of science—instead of the lover, although it causes pain and is a source of frustration and sadness. Why can’t she have both? Must the cost of knowledge always be loneliness?
Niu: I think the collection moves toward trying to accept the truth that those two things, love and knowledge, can coexist. They actually are more abundant when they do coexist. There are not all these false choices between scarcity versus abundance, consumption versus production, and love versus knowledge. That the more of one there is, the more of everything there is. This is still an idea that I’m learning and manifesting in multiple aspects of my life, including love. Perhaps this collection begins to mature but doesn’t show a fully mature state because I haven’t yet achieved a full acceptance of these things.
Rumpus: What is a seemingly unavoidable circumstance of the future you’re actually looking forward to?
Niu: A lot of problems concern the imagination. There are places where we’re being required to create imaginative solutions to fix the world. For example, regarding the climate, slowing global warming by reducing the production of non-biodegradable plastics that go into the environment. How can we imagine products made of materials that come from waste or other things that are already abundant, like creating plastics from seaweed?
A lot of people are answering the call. My roommate on Christmas Island ran a small-scale plastic recycling plant because there was no recycling on the small, isolated island. She would organize beach cleanups, collect plastics, sort them, grind them down, and make them into objects like plant pots and coasters. While that’s one small-scale example, the types of mobilization, and the ways people come together to imagine and invent really excite me. I feel like I’ve already begun to see what that does, and it gives me hope for the future.
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Author photograph courtesy of Stephanie Niu
