There are poets whose work doesn’t simply sit on the page—it moves through you. It asks you to slow your breathing. To look again. To recognize how much of living is made up of carrying: memory, lineage, grief, love, and the quiet, daily rituals that keep us tethered to one another even when language falters.
The conversation with Andy Chen and his poems gathered here are attentive in that way. They linger in museums and kitchens, in bodies beside us and bodies long gone, in moments where touch nearly happens—or happens too late. They speak to inheritance not as something fixed, but as something fragile and alive, shaped by art, intimacy, and loss. What moves me most is how these poems refuse spectacle. Instead, they honor the small, human reckonings: a breath left on glass, a name passed down through generations, the ache of wanting to be held without fully knowing how. Reading this work feels like standing beside someone who is looking closely—at a painting, a ritual object, a sleeping child—and trusting you enough to let you look too. The poems remind us that love is not always loud, that grief does not announce itself, and that beauty often arrives fractured, imperfect, and deeply earned.
In this conversation, I wanted to sit with the poet inside those moments—to talk about attention, about the body as archive, about how art becomes a way of surviving what we cannot fix or fully understand. What follows is less an interview than an offering: a shared space to think about what we carry, what carries us, and how poetry makes room for both.
Darius Phelps: Many of these poems are in conversation with visual art—museum objects, paintings, photographs—yet they never feel like ekphrastic exercises alone. How do you approach writing with an artwork rather than about it, and what does the artwork allow you to say about intimacy, inheritance, or loss that language alone might not?
Andy Chen: I love ekphrasis because of the way visual art resists language. What moves me about art is often ineffable—it affects me in ways I can’t neatly explain. I think poetry comes from a similar place. When I write a poem, I’m usually trying to capture something I don’t have another way of expressing: a sense of longing, a question about love, a question about myself. If I had another way to express it, I wouldn’t use a poem.
That’s also why writing poems alongside visual art feels natural to me. When a piece of art moves me, I don’t feel like I have a clean way to articulate why. So I need all the tools of poetry—form, sound, and language working together—to get at that feeling. The artwork becomes a kind of entry point into something that’s already there inside me, something I’ve been circling but haven’t found language for yet.
Take “The Search”, for example. I saw that photograph at the Muhammad Ali Center, and while the poem is about many things—America, the Atlanta spa shootings, violence, self-doubt—it was really sparked by something harder to name: the beauty of all the yellows, the care depicted in the photo, the defiance in the face of the subject. That photograph released something that was already moving inside me. The art gave shape to an expression that was waiting.
So it’s not just a jumping-off point—it’s also a kinship. Whether it’s a photograph, or a Rothko, or a surrealist painting, I’m recognizing something in the artwork—tension, loss, emotion—that I hope others might recognize too.
DP: Across the collection, there’s a recurring tension between carrying and being carried—children on backs, ancestral names, grief, love, even silence. How do you understand “burden” in these poems? When does it become devotion, ritual, or a form of survival?
AC: I think about family constantly, especially filial piety and what that means in an American context. My parents were immigrants, and I grew up in a three-generation household—my parents and my grandparents were all immigrants from Taiwan. Each generation had a very different relationship to America and American values.
In American culture, there’s such an emphasis on individualism—on pursuing your passion, becoming independent. But in the culture my parents came from, there’s a stronger assumption of mutual support across generations. At some point, the roles shift. When you’re young, your parents carry you—financially, emotionally, literally. And then, as they age, you begin carrying them.
That shift can feel complicated, especially when expectations aren’t clearly named. The word burden has a negative connotation, but I don’t necessarily see it that way or mean it that way. It can be heavy, yes—but it can also be an expression of love. Even when my parents say they don’t want to be a burden, I want to carry that weight.
I think a lot of my work wrestles with that conundrum. Heritage can be a burden. The past can be a burden. The future can be a burden. Love itself can be a burden—it brings joy and pain at the same time. These are the weights we inherit and choose, sometimes without clear instructions.
DP: Several poems linger in moments of rupture or near-rupture—separations, misunderstandings, infertility, fear—yet they resist clear resolution. What draws you to these suspended emotional states, and how do you decide when a poem should withhold closure rather than offer it?
AC: I think one of the central frustrations of love is that the closer you get to someone, the more aware you become that you can never fully know what they’re thinking. Even with someone you love deeply, you don’t know if they love you in the same way, or if you mean the same thing to them. That lack of certainty is inherent to relationships.
So when I write about separation or misunderstanding, it doesn’t feel like I’m avoiding closure—it feels like I’m being honest. Many of the questions that draw me to poetry are questions that can’t be answered. Poems, for me, often capture the process of wrestling with something that resists resolution.
That said, I do believe poems can offer a different kind of closure. Not a tidy answer, but recognition. When you read a poem and feel seen—whether it was written yesterday or 200 years ago—that’s a kind of closure too. It doesn’t solve the problem of love, but it reminds you that you’re not alone in asking the question.
DP: There is an attentiveness to the body throughout the work—breath, hunger, touch, symmetry, sound—often set against systems of violence, beauty, or history. How do you navigate writing the body as both vulnerable and knowing, especially in poems that confront love alongside fear or harm?
AC: I never feel like I have the language to talk about the body precisely. The body is a kind of conundrum—it’s separate from the mind, but also inseparable from it. In poems like “Light Red Over Black”, the body is telling the speaker something before the mind can explain it: breath becoming a sob, sound triggering panic, the physical sensations of grief and abandonment.
I’m often drawn to moments where bodies almost touch. When two bodies touch—or nearly touch—something magical happens. It’s not just skin and heat. It’s emotional connection, or sometimes it’s longing. It’s the desire to be seen and known in a way no one else sees or knows you—because isn’t that what we want out of every relationship? Physical touch becomes an imperfect stand-in for that deeper desire.
When I reach for someone’s hand, what I’m reaching for is much more than the hand. That suspension—where touch isn’t enough, but it’s all we have for sure—that’s where a lot of these poems live. The body resists language, but poetry lets me try anyway.
DP: Listening to you, I’m struck by how much of this resonates with my own thinking—about grief, trauma, and how the body carries what we haven’t yet named. During my PhD, I became more attentive to what my body had been holding: clenched fists in sleep, tension in my shoulders, exhaustion I hadn’t acknowledged. Writing became a way of learning the body’s language, even knowing it would never translate perfectly.
AC: That makes a lot of sense to me. Longing and grief live in the body. You can try to describe them—where they sit, how they feel—but it’s always an imperfect translation. We’re trying to translate something physical into language, and language will always fall short. But maybe that’s the work. Maybe poetry is the attempt itself—the reaching, the listening, the trying to stay with what the body already knows.
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.
Andy Chen is a Taiwanese American poet and educator. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the Bogliasco Foundation, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the 2024 winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, and his poems appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. He teaches at John Burroughs School in St. Louis. To read more, visit heyandychen.com.