There’s a quiet brilliance that happens when a poet refuses to choose between order and rupture—when form and chaos become collaborators instead of rivals. Speaking with Christian Yeo Xuan feels like standing at that intersection, where discipline meets vulnerability, and the lyric “I” becomes a living, breathing act of becoming. There’s an ease in his presence, a warmth that blurs the line between conversation and confession. His poems—brimming with tenderness, myth, and restlessness—carry the echo of inheritance and the pulse of migration, the ache of love and the weight of belonging. And in his words, you feel both the precision of craft and the tremor of something deeply human reaching back toward you.
In our conversation, we return often to the sonnet, the so-called “container,” and to what happens when that container burns. Christian describes this tension between form and wilderness as “generative,” a place where the body of the poem becomes both architecture and demolition site. It’s a kind of sacred rebellion—one that reminds me why I fell in love with poetry in the first place: because it lets us name what we can’t say outright, to tell the truth “through distortion,” as Christian so beautifully puts it.
Across our dialogue, we wander through Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, through buses and birds, through East Asian mythologies of debt and devotion, through the soundtracks of our boyhoods—J. Cole, Kendrick, the Eagles. We talk about mothers and grandmothers, love and exile, and the ways geography can become a form of survival. At the heart of it all is the lyric’s impossible task: to hold contradiction without erasing it.
When Christian speaks, he does so with the precision of a poet, playwright, a beautiful human being, and the tenderness of a son. His reflections remind us that to write is to perform ourselves “to ourselves,” to craft intimacy from fracture. Listening to him felt like tracing the architecture of care—a poetics that resists neatness and instead leans into what’s messy, fractured, and painfully human. I invite you to listen in, not just to the answers, but to the silences between them—the pauses that hold grief, wonder, and a reverence for language that refuses to stay still.
When-the-Container-Burns_-Christian-Yeo-Xuan-on-Form-Tenderness-and-the-Truth-Beneath-LanguageDr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and God Wore Her Face the Day I Was Born (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.
Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer and actor based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. He is the author of So Rain, winner of the 2025 Sundress Chapbook Competition. His work has been published or is forthcoming in EPOCH, ANMLY, Indiana Review, Oxford Poetry, and The Hajar Book of Rage, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, and has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, National Poetry Competition, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Tin House, Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He is working on a novel, which was a finalist for the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship, and a poetry collection. He holds a BA in Law from Cambridge.