Winner of the 2024 Host Publications Chapbook Prize
"How might one concede the delights of the present despite the undercurrent of ecological dread? The poems of Stephanie Niu provide one such mode of looking at the world. With the care of an archivist, no subject is overlooked—a sense of attention and wonder extends to chiton, rock louse, hagfish. Niu uses maps throughout the chapbook to create her atlas, intertwining the scientific and the lyrical.
Stephanie Niu’s poetry is like the pull of gravity. It urges us to keep going. And in reading it, we are tugged toward tenderness, resilience, toward a place “where survival / includes every living thing.” We arrive there salty, flecked with sand, open-mouthed and open-hearted."
