Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu

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.”

Featuring an introduction by poet Natasha Rao.

Stephanie Niu is a Chinese-American poet, digital humanities scholar, and ecology enthusiast from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest, and the editor of Our Island, Our Future: A Zine of Youth Poetry from Christmas Island. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for community archiving research on Christmas Island’s immigration and labor history.

The Official Survived By Playlist, Curated by Stephanie Niu