Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance

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Winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Spring 2024.Full of lament and wonder in equal measure, Stephanie Niu's poems are maps that guide us to a place of intimate attention where we can hold what is most vulnerable and tender on this planet, to better understand what has already been lost and what is currently at stake. These poems collect fragments of memory to shape an archive of things lost--from the fleeting raptures of childhood to the species nearing and beyond extinction.An "atlas of disappearance, " SURVIVED BY animates extinct, endangered, and recovering species of Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory, through visual poems that chronicle the extinction crisis without relenting to its abstraction. Scientific language intertwines with the lyric, and in this fusion "the known easily becomes strange." Even the language of scholarship morphs under Niu's microscope--depth becomes death, then knowing, when names of deep-sea creatures are spoken aloud into something small enough to hold in our hands.In the act of learning to "become a better animal, " these poems reach out to us with tender curiosity and deep compassion. Using language as a method of preservation, we discover that we "do not have the words to keep everything alive" but also that "The most powerful things can't be named.