Happy New Year, friends!
Last week, as I was taking stock of the past year, I was disappointed to realize how few books I had read in 2025. I could only count 17 total books, far fewer than usual. I won’t go into the excuses for why I read less than usual. But I know that reading helps me process information, and it inspires me to be a better writer, editor and teacher. It’s also still one of the few things in life that I find purely enjoyable. So one of my goals for 2026 is simply to read more. I shy away from setting new year resolutions, but I do like to articulate some goals for where to place my energy in the coming year. And so far, so good. In the last week, I’ve dedicated time to reading some of the books I collected along my 2025 travels.
The first book I read in 2026 was Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, which received the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. In the book’s foreword, Major Jackson writes, “Occasionally, one encounters a voice so attuned to the groundswell of their being that their poems arrive like luxuriant explorations of language and feeling. Such is the work of Stephanie Niu and her debut collection of poetry.” I agree.
I met Stephanie briefly last October when we were both readers at the Decatur Book Festival. You can watch Stephanie’s reading from that day on YouTube. Stephanie’s poems about her family are some of my favorite from the multiple threads that she weaves together in I Would Define the Sun. So it was especially lovely to meet Stephanie’s parents at her reading, and to see how proud they are of her and her work. One of my favorite poems from the book, “Information Worker at the End of the World,” was originally published in Ecotone.
Information Worker at the End of the World
Stephanie Niu
When the ship to Mars has already departed,
and my wealthiest friends have plots in New Zealand
for their children, or have no children, what box
do I put my treasure in? I have one waterproof bag
that clips at the top. Every month, money drips
into my retirement account. You think the world
will still be around when you’re sixty-five? I don’t know
what it means to survive. I’ve learned all I can
about the Svalbard seed vault. I used to spend time
on the names of birds until the warblers disappeared.
The earth is more burned out than my coworkers.
The mantle is deathly dry. My doctor tells me
I ought to moisturize. Weekly, my milk expires.
I panic when I flip to a new month on my free
Audubon calendar. There is too much time
and not enough of it. I’m a bad steward caught
red-eyed. I board flights, order takeout high,
forget to recycle. Some days I wake and resolve
to arm myself for a righteous fight. I will make
coffee grounds into face scrub, eat kombucha
bacteria raw. Other days I wake already late
to my first meeting, say hello brightly
though the laptop screen is all my gunked-up
eyes can see. A blue glow sized to a day, an hour,
an act of speech. Everything else beyond me.
~
If you live in or around Lexington, Kentucky, I invite you to come out to Poetry at the Table on Wednesday, January 7th. I’ll be reading with the very talented David Cazden, and I’m looking forward to hearing others read during the open mic portion of the evening. This is a hugely popular event, held monthly at Kenwick Table in Lexington and hosted by B. Elizabeth Beck, and I’m so glad to have the chance to read some poems from Feller to this audience.
In case you missed it…
In case you missed it… I recently shared a guest post featuring a conversation between Ruth Mukwana and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Emily Choate’s review of Feller appeared recently in The Chattanooga Times Free Press.
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Denton Loving 