In Darius Phelps’ debut poetry collection My God’s Been Silent, the speaker “swallow[s] sleep/ to silence the oldest church hymns/ I no longer/ believe in.” In “My Benadryl Serves as an Antidepressant” the speaker tests his mother’s saying that “we should never/ beg for love” when “it’s the only way/ to remember to feel alive.” That desire to live–in spite of the visceral “tickle, / reminiscent/ of your hands/ along [his] spine”–or as the speaker wakes to “nails carving half-moons into [his] skin” is a testament to the lyrical fervor and unsparing quietude of Phelps’ poems. In this sense, poetry becomes a dreamscape wherein “our baby girl” “calls me/ by a name/ I’ve never heard/ spoken with such light.” That light, in turn, illuminates like the silence Phelps has kept, which has “become[] a ghost that never leaves the room.”
Tiffany Troy: You begin the collection with an epigraph by Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” What is poetry to you and how do you connect your creative process with the vocation of teaching others about the craft and value of writing?
Darius Phelps: Poetry to me, is one of the truest acts of both excavation and becoming. Right now, with the way the world is, we need poetry now — more than ever. It’s the place where I return to myself, where I sift through the silt of memory, grief, joy, and the stories I’ve inherited. Poetry allows me to name what I was once afraid to touch. It offers language to the quiet, the wounds, the small resurrections. It is how I remember I’m still alive — and how I make sense of that aliveness.
As an educator, I see poetry as a kind of offering. A gateway. A permission slip. In my classrooms, poetry becomes the bridge between who my students are and who they’re becoming. It creates a space where they can speak without armor, where vulnerability isn’t punished but instead rightfully honored. My creative process is deeply tied to this belief: that writing is a sacred act of witnessing — of the self, of community, of the world we dare to imagine. When I write, I’m practicing the same courage I ask of my students. When they write, I’m reminded that language can be both mirror and balm for all types of wounds.
Ultimately, poetry is not separate from my teaching; it is the heartbeat of it. It’s how I cultivate healing-centered spaces, how I build trust, how I show my students that their stories matter — not in spite of their pain, but through it. Poetry teaches us how to hold the darkness and still reach for the light. And in that reaching, we become something truer, something freer, together.
TT: How does your first poem, “God Forgives; I Don’t” set up the readers for the poems that are to follow?
DP: Hmm, that’s a really good question! This project has been three years in the making. It has taken on many shapes and various titles (two separate chapbooks, a hybrid memoir) until I landed on what is now my first full length collection. No matter what modality it was, I knew I wanted and needed it to start with rage. Rage was the truest entry point—the emotion I had spent most of my adult life swallowing. “God Forgives; I Don’t” is me finally unclenching my jaw, not realizing how much of my trauma I had been unknowingly storing in my own body. It’s the moment I stop pretending I am untouched by what I’ve endured in academia, in the classroom, in my own family.
The poem clears the room of any expectation that this book will be polite or palatable. It announces that grief is not always soft, that healing is not always holy, and that forgiveness—especially for a Black man learning to sit with and in his grief. I wanted the first poem to act like a key, or maybe a warning label. It tells the reader, “This is not a collection that shies away. This is a body breaking open in real time.” And once that door swings open, everything that follows—grief, tenderness, longing, spiritual conflict, survival—flows from that first rupture. The rage becomes a compass, but not a destination. It shows where I’ve been, but also gestures toward where I’m trying to go: toward softness, toward rest, toward a version of myself that doesn’t apologize for feeling deeply. Sitting with this exact rage lets the book be honest from the very first line. It gives readers permission to sit with their own fire too—without shame, without explanation.
TT: You write in that poem, “I’ve seen / how storms / are born from whispers // how thunder rises / not from mercy / but from refusal” and I enjoyed following that first rupture throughout the course of the collection. Could you tell us a bit more about how you build this collection together, through its ebbs and flows, to its current form?
DP: One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the icon Audre Lorde: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.” That line has quietly become my mantra when I look back over the course of 2025. When it came to building this collection, I knew there was no escaping the storms that shaped it. I wasn’t interested in mercy for the sake of palatability. I was interested in refusal—refusal as survival, as boundary, as truth-telling.
The book came together the way grief and memory often do: in waves. Some poems arrive like thunderclaps—angry, sharp, unwilling to soften themselves. Others move more slowly, whispering, circling, letting the ache breathe. I paid close attention to that rhythm. I wanted the reader to feel the ebb and flow of holding it together and coming undone, of silence followed by rupture. Each section asks a different question of the speaker: What must be said? What must be protected? What happens when we stop begging for permission to speak?
Ultimately, the collection is built on accumulation—of losses, of reckonings, of moments where refusal becomes the only honest response. By the time the book reaches its final shape, I wanted it to feel earned, not resolved. Storms don’t end cleanly. They pass through, leaving evidence behind. This book is that evidence: deliberate, unflinching, and rooted in the belief that naming what harms us is its own form of liberation.
TT: Turning to the overall structure of the collection, the collection has twelve sections, including the Prelude and Epilogue. How did you land upon this structure? How did you organize poems within each section?
DP: I am an avid bibliophile and musicophile, so I am constantly reading, constantly listening—especially to albums, especially old-school ’90s R&B that knows how to linger in the body long after the last track fades. With that being said, I don’t encounter music as background noise; I encounter it as archive, as altar, as a place where memory learns how to breathe—without apology.
My grandfather died in my arms on June 21st, 2013, and I haven’t been the same since. Grief rearranged the furniture of my spirit and my body. It taught me how sound can hold what language cannot. It took me exactly a decade to look back and not just mourn him, but celebrate his life—his love, his legacy, and the sacred twenty years we were given together.
When I think of albums that are pure gold, top to bottom—Mariah Carey’s Butterfly, The Emancipation of Mimi, and Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse—I think about endurance. About women, in particular, singing themselves back into wholeness. I think about how Mariah Carey taught me that vulnerability is not weakness, that melisma can be a form of testimony. Alongside that lineage, the work of RINI and my new favorite BIPOC male artist, BOY SODA, with his debut SOULSTAR, reminds me that tenderness is still radical, still necessary, still alive.
All of this bleeds into my writing. This collection listens as much as it speaks. It is built like an album—interludes of quiet, tracks of rage, moments of softness that arrive when you least expect them. In many ways, this book is me learning how to sit with grief without rushing it, how to honor my grandfather by choosing love, and how to let sound, memory, and language harmonize into something that can carry us forward.
TT: Speaking of language and languages, you include Korean for: “This sadness does not define me” as a refrain in “Fingerprints.” You also include Korean in “Where home is” to similar effect. How does Korean or Korean culture help inform the speaker’s sense of home as not a physical place but in some ways an interior space, of identity and of yearning?
DP: Korean enters the poems less as translation and more as atmosphere—as memory, inheritance, and emotional texture. I don’t use it to explain so much as to return. For me, Korean carries a different weight than English. English is the language of instruction, argument, survival in public spaces. Korean is quieter, closer to the body. It’s the language of elders, of things said indirectly, of feelings that don’t need to be named so sharply to be understood.
In “Fingerprints,” repeating “This sadness does not define me” in Korean becomes a kind of grounding refrain—not a declaration meant to convince anyone else, but something the speaker needs to hear themselves. Saying it in Korean allows the line to live somewhere deeper than affirmation. It feels ancestral, almost protective, like borrowing a voice that existed before the sadness and will outlast it. That line also comes from one of my favorite songs by Tablo, from his debut solo album Fever’s End. Carrying it into the poem feels like carrying music as mantra—letting a lyric that once held me become something I could return to on the page. The repetition becomes ritual rather than explanation.
Similarly, in “Where Home Is,” the Korean phrase that appears is drawn from another song on Fever’s End, and its presence works in the same way. It’s not there to be decoded so much as felt. Music has always been a bridge for me—between languages, between emotional states, between who I was and who I’m becoming. Bringing those lyrics into the poem lets the speaker hold onto home as something interior and mobile, shaped as much by sound and memory as by place. So Korean becomes a way of naming what can’t fully be said in English: the ache of belonging without certainty, the comfort of lineage without possession. Filtered through music, those phrases carry both personal history and emotional inheritance. They help the speaker understand home not as a destination, but as something lived inside the body—spoken, sung, remembered, and returned to again and again, even when it remains just out of reach.
TT: Speaking of music, I want to turn a moment to the visual aspect of your collection. How does the white space (caesura, line breaks, stanza breaks, indentation) work for you as techniques to create a rhythm or atmosphere in your poems?
DP: It’s important to emphasize here the act of reading all of your poems outloud — the good, the bad, the ugly. White space is where I learn how the poem wants to breathe. Caesura becomes a held inhale, a hesitation that mirrors grief, desire, or even at times disbelief; line breaks are decisions about when to stop myself from saying too much; stanza breaks are small acts of mercy, places where the reader—and the speaker—can rest. I think of indentation as a body leaning, pulling back, or whispering.
For me, the page is a score. The silence is doing as much work as the sound. I want the reader to feel the pauses the way I felt them when the poem was first forming—those moments when language failed me and I had to let absence speak instead. White space holds what I’m not ready to name yet. It carries the weight of what’s been survived, what’s still trembling. If the poem sounds true when spoken, if the silences land with intention, then I know the form is doing its job.
TT: I’ve read “Ode to My Pothos” as a kind of ars poetica. It is a three-stanza prose poem wherein you write: “All it takes is a little patience, a few drinks of water here and there, rays of decadent sunlight and stolen moments of solitude.” The collection features longer multi-sectioned poems, and poems with shorter lines and longer lines. For you, does the poem find its form or vice versa? Is it some ways a pothos plant that you can call yours?
DP: I love that reading of the poem, and I think you’re right to name it as an ars poetica—though maybe a quiet one, the kind that doesn’t announce itself as instruction so much as practice. For me, the poem almost always finds its form. I rarely sit down thinking, this will be a prose poem or this will be three sections. Instead, I’m listening—paying attention to what the poem is asking for in its breath, its pacing, its silences. Some poems want room to sprawl and return, to circle back through memory in sections. Others need to stay small, clipped, held tightly, like a single thought you don’t want to overexplain.
“Ode to My Pothos” was one of the first poems I wrote in a class at Brooklyn Poets and it taught me a lot about that kind of listening. Plants don’t grow on command; they respond to conditions. Light. Water. Time. Neglect, even. That’s how poems work for me, too. They grow unevenly. They lean. They surprise you by thriving in corners you didn’t expect. I don’t own them in the way we usually mean ownership—I tend them, I notice them, I try not to overhandle them. Yes, there’s something deeply personal about that relationship. Like the pothos, the poem becomes “mine” not because I control it, but because I’ve learned how to care for it—how to recognize when it needs more space, more patience, or simply to be left alone in the light.
So maybe the form isn’t something I impose or something the poem magically discovers on its own. It’s a collaboration. A slow negotiation. A practice of attention. In that sense, the poem really is a pothos I can call mine—not perfect, not symmetrical, but alive, growing, and teaching me how to stay.
TT: I felt that tension between staying versus in flux very much at the core of this collection. What are you working on today?
DP: This collection really helped me reflect on the importance of having my story out in the world—of breaking the mold of what it means to both show and embrace masculinity and vulnerability. Writing it taught me that staying and being in flux don’t have to be opposites; they can coexist in the same body, the same breath, the same poem.
Right now, I’m working on deepening that conversation with a few projects going on simultaneously. My second collection, The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books), comes out in March and is rooted heavily in the story of my mother and our journey, which I am ecstatic to share with the world. The project after that is a chapbook on desire tentatively titled, GOOD BOY.
Besides that, I’m moving between poetry and pedagogy—drafting new poems that sit with grief, love, and tenderness without rushing them toward resolution, while also thinking about how these texts live in classrooms and communities. I’m interested in what happens when softness is treated not as weakness, but as a form of survival and resistance. Lately, my work has been asking: What does it look like to remain open, even as the world keeps trying to harden us?
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts with your readers of the world?
DP: I keep returning to something that surfaced in a favorite conversation of mine —with Andrew Chi Keong Yim—that idea that writing, at its core, is an act of staying present with what aches, without needing to tidy it up or make it palatable. If I have any closing thoughts for readers of the world, it’s this: let yourself be unfinished. Let yourself be tender in a time that keeps telling you to armor up.
I write because I believe our stories—especially the ones shaped by grief, love, silence, and survival—deserve air. They deserve witnesses. If something in these poems feels like a hand reaching for yours, take it. Stay with it. And if my work gives you even a small permission to speak more honestly, to love more openly, or to sit with your own becoming without apology, then that’s more than enough for me.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.