Austin Poetry Review: Tell us about your recent work.
Stephanie Niu: My newest full-length book, I Would Define the Sun, came out last year. A lot of the poems explore distances between people, places, and feelings, and attempt to close those distances – whether those distances are created via geographical space, language, or something else. I grew up in a bilingual house, and my Mandarin was never great; in some poems, I try to use that wedge I experienced between English and Mandarin as a formal or sonic device to play with the role of language and sound in the poem. There’s also the geographical distance centered around time I spent on Christmas Island, an island in the Indian Ocean that’s over 10,000 miles away from New York, where I live. I think the push and pull of approaching places that can feel very distant or, even distancing the speaker before closing that gap again is a motion that propels my writing process.
APR: Share a 3-10 line excerpt from one of your poems that you feel encapsulates your style.
SN: This is from “I Crossed the Sea Boardwalk,” a poem that I wrote on Christmas Island, and which is sort of about the island.
I Crossed the Sea Boardwalk
tentatively as if entering
back into a dream. Faulty beams
were marked with orange cones.
I stepped lightly. My blue dress blew
in the wind, long and impractical.
My style veers between narrative and lyric: I like to document reality and what actually happened in poetry while using a sonic logic to propel it forward. I was reading a lot of Ama Codjoe at the time, especially her book, Bluest Nude. In that collection, there is a lot of internal rhyme and repetition – such as blue becoming the blue of wind becoming the blue of the color. This inspired me to lean into letting the sound of the poem move me forward while I was drafting “I Crossed the Sea Boardwalk.”
APR: What themes or ideas do you find yourself returning to in your poetry?
SN: Place has often been a very generative theme for me. It’s always hard to reflect on your own poetics and be like, “What obsesses me?” because that feels like it changes so much, day to day, season to season. Writing from Christmas Island made me think a lot about distance because it was so far from home, but it also felt so close in a lot of ways because I was surrounded by Chinese aunties and uncles who talked like my mom. These days, I’m writing a lot of frenetic poems that move in a jolting way because I live in New York City and I’m usually reading poems on the subway. And, when I was living in Northern California, I was reading a lot of Aracelis Girmay, sitting in the stands of trees and writing a lot of poems that were pastoral, more about landscapes. Place has often driven my core curiosity.
APR: Who are some poets or writers who have influenced you?
SN: I already mentioned Ama Codjoe –- I feel like she and Aracelis Girmay are some of my favorite poets. I feel like they come from a similar lineage. At Ama’s launch for Bluest Nude, Aracelis was there and read one of my favorite poems from the collection. I was hyperventilating with joy. It was amazing. I also like poets with very strong control of voice, like Mary Ruefle. Most recently, I read a chapbook by Hilary Plum called Important Groups that exhibit a similar type of control. I actually found her work through her essay collection. I really loved her essays, how she engages in politics via her writing, but very much with an artist’s lens of focusing on the line between form and content.
APR: What are you hoping to explore in your writing next?
SN: I’ve been really interested in pushing form in the sense of the poem’s literal shape on the page. These days, something weird is happening: I’ll start a poem and then find out I can’t complete it without making some kind of drastic formal decision. For some reason, writing left-aligned, fairly medium-sized lines that break on the reg, just hasn’t been cutting it for me. Or, I’m finding it boring and less generative. So, I’ll start with a left-aligned, blocky form, stop, and then make the lines extremely skinny with very harsh enjambment, or have no lines at all, or try some other method to add friction. This has surprised even me, but I find I can’t keep writing block-shaped poems without changing something formally to figure out what I really want to say.
About the Poet
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. Her debut poetry collection, I Would Define the Sun (2025), won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance (2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Hopkins Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
