Following the release of his debut e-chapbook, So Rain, Christian Yeo Xuan spoke with Nafisa Hussain about the collection’s meditations on love, grief, migration, and belonging. Here, they discussed the title’s poetics of overwhelm and risk, the porous boundaries between familial and chosen love, the entanglement of personal and political pain, and the recurring imagery of birds, rain, light, and trees as ways of approaching masculinity, memory, survival, and longing for community.
Nafisa Hussain: What is the significance of the title So Rain, especially in relation to the final line of “Road Trip Sonnet”?
Christian Yeo Xuan: On the one vibes-based hand, the title is pretty. On the other less vibes-based hand, it’s a nod to overwhelm (syntactically compressing “so let it rain…”, or “so it rains…”). Rain itself is laden with metaphorical significances but it can also be a vehicle for other metaphorical significances (“a rain of light”, “a rain of knives”, “a rain of Jacob Elordi lookalikes,” etc.). It’s a sensation of being caught in something, there’s a phenomenon that happens to you, that you have little control over. On the other hand (I’m on three hands now but don’t let that bother you), it’s a form of belligerence, a demand for the rain, for what’s behind the cipher of rain. In lyric as in life I try to dive head-first into moments of gnarly density, even if it takes years to parse through them, even if it takes many palimpsests. Those moments feel the most fruitful, they’re where the magic happens. I have a good friend, Jessie, who says that in the long run, intensity is the most important thing in any which direction or vector. Another friend, Nina, recently said that it’s important not to lead a seasonless life, which I wrote down immediately. So, I mean, the title is defiant—it’s a refusal to shell up, it’s a poetics of risk, of swinging at the fences.
NH: What would you say are the distinctions and similarities between familial and chosen love within this collection?
CYX: Clichés are terrible, but some clichés are true—love is love, right? I try to elide the distinction between familial and chosen love. In both cases, the stakes are high, you start to feel interconnected, you live and die for another person, and then that ebbs and flows, because it has to, because that’s how it goes. I think if you love someone, and that someone is your family, of any description, geography solves nothing. You’re going to love that person regardless. The same inherent human dramas play themselves out. If there’s any difference, it’s manifestational. You can betray given family the most, inasmuch as you might also drop everything to show up at their doorstep. It’s the most socially legible, right? So, you’re socially allowed to sacrifice, but also to constrain. Compulsed even, in certain societies. Chosen family is a bit more free and freeing, but it can end up occupying the same space. You end up rehearsing the same stakes.
NH: What is the significance between personal and political pain in pieces like “Snippet #15” and “Snippet #7”?
CYX: Both snippets try to pull focus on the political by looking at the personal. It’s that old truism that the more specific something is, the more universal. I mean, I could have had poems that paraphrased Omar El Akkad and ended with “Free Palestine”, but instead I tried to localize these poems to this very specific moment in time in the town of Taanayel, in the Beqaa Valley, embedded in the Syrian and Palestinian refugee crises. “Snippet #15” relies on a sleight-of-hand, it tries to set up a familiar narrative frame. It has all these funny details about Tomiyasu and BTS, and then it pulls the rug out from under you. I think it tries to reflect the pain of, like, Syrian refugees who live in tents for ten years and stop going to school. There isn’t a hierarchy of suffering, but it’d be remiss to focus on this East Asian speaker. “Snippet #7” uses the persona poem to enter a poem of witness sideways. I struggled with this poem for a long time, and then the persona unlocked it for me. I think because it’s so absurd, it was the only way I knew to apprehend that level of suffering, of what it means even to witness that. Both these poems use the Yanyi prose-poem as a way of holding horizontal thinking. Ultimately, all pain is political, and an apolitical aesthetics is window-dressing—it’s a total waste of time. We live in a time of genocide. It is frankly a joke to be apolitical. You have to look at the war machine and do something about it. You either love something or you don’t. There’s no point making excuses.
NH: Birds are mentioned in multiple poems, whether that be ducks, geese, ladybirds, or as a metaphor in “Poem in Which the Father is the Metaphor.” What drew you to this choice?
CYX: I don’t know, is it my hyper-fixation on peregrine falcons? My love for Vulfpeck? My brother’s childhood encounter with a pelican? Jurong Bird Park? On a more serious note, I think a sense of being caged carries through many of these poems, of carrying a held-in rage born of a lifetime spent suppressing the will. I think birds are this cipher of everything that the speaker does not have—and if you think about the image of the person watching the bird, in that scene, the bird is in flight, while the speaker is not. If I had to guess, it would be that I envied them, the birds. They have no separation between their real life and their daily life. They are not waiting to be free. They just are.
NH: Why does certain nature imagery, such as rain, light, and trees recur across multiple poems?
CYX: It’s got to be the poets I love—Louise Glück and Jean Valentine use so much nature imagery, and then, of course, Victoria Chang, Aria Aber, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Carl Phillips, so on and so forth. You are what you read, etc. I think there’s also something unruined about natural phenomena, that someone who mostly kicks it in urban spaces is drawn to. Some of the most mesmeric encounters I’ve ever had have been with nature, in expanses of quiet. It’s funny, because I’m very prone to animal imagery in fiction. I don’t know why. I’ll ask the trees.
NH: Could you discuss your choice to work across a variety of different poetic styles?
CYX: I read an interview today where Yasmin Zaher said that one of the best ways to create a character’s downfall is to give them an obsession, which bodes well for my tangling with form. To me, form is substance. It gives you an entryway into a poem that gets closer to the heart of the thing. With what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have done with the contemporary sonnet, the pressurized container gives you an opportunity. Sound and rhythm are pleasurable, which I’m sensitive to after spending all my teens listening to hip-hop. Punctuation and breath, particularly between stanzas, are really important to me. Over the last few years, I’ve also come into contact with more visual artists than ever, including my friend aj, who was always busy yapping my ear off about installations and topography. I’ve spent a lot of time perambulating around galleries being weirdly drawn to abstract expressionism and wondering why. But maybe all of this is retroactive; it’s really about the poets I kick it or have kicked it with, all of whom are pushing the boundaries of what poem can do, what poetry is, for the possibility of song to carry the truth, or a truth, of the mystery of lived experience. I’m extraordinarily lucky that some of my favorite poets are my friends. What I know about topography, I owe to Aishvarya. What I know about strangeness is from Will and Imogen. The fictive poem, I learned from Annalisa. What I know of compression, I owe forever to Lis. My biggest inspiration is the crew. What luck. I don’t take that for granted at all.
NH: Could you expand on the duality between tenderness and tension within brotherhood?
CYX: Being a boy is a funny thing. I’m at an art residency in La Plata now, near Buenos Aires, and spent the afternoon drinking maté and watching Arsenal round up the EPL title with Dabi, who’s a screenwriter from Honduras. I grew up in boys’ schools until I was sixteen, and my friends and I thought of ourselves as a brotherhood; I think we literally used that term. This sat nicely alongside my three brothers, who are some of my best friends in the world. Unfortunately, I think masculinity is a tricky thing—even if you love each other, your id is playing against trauma, you always have to hedge against the possibility that other men are going to punish you for your soft belly. You even have the tools and language of violence for that; in Singapore, the language of the military trickles down through everything. Back in high school, friendships were so intense, it was like I love you, you’re my brother, we’ll be together forever, it’s us till the end, backs against the wall, this kind of thing. Male loneliness epidemics feared us. The boys I ran with were so angry, but I would see them cry. And smoke in the toilet, and cry. People’s dads were beating them up. They listened to so much Death Cab for Cutie, and played football at the back of the class, and stuffed shit in the ceilings, and hit each other’s dicks to say hi. It was a very specific time, an education in a centrifuge of sorts, the duality continuing into adulthood. I think it was Sophie Mackintosh who said, “what is a boy but a hurtable man?”
NH: How do the poems navigate the complexity between familial harm and familial love?
CYX: I don’t want to be all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once”, but I think I do have to get all hand-wavey and “two things can be true at once.” “Grace” is, I think, the only poem of mine my friend Iris likes; she brings it up all the time apropos of nothing, like, I’ll literally send her something new and she’ll say, “I love the one with the tigers.” That’s an example of a poem where the two operate in parallel at all times. I think the Yanyi prose-poem is great for horizontal thinking because negative space encourages quick jumps. There’s also “Masculinity Studies,” which is my friend Lis’ favorite. The lyric essay allowed me to build on long lines and recurring sonic moves, to fritter back and forth between harm and love, like an otter. It’s easy to rely on stereotypes and Kit Chan’s 天冷就回来 to pontificate about blood being thicker than water, implicating brutality and tenderness and KTV mandopop songs where the instrumentals are way too long, that sort of thing, but I think that might just be an ocean of nonsense, a well-adjusted, stakes-less, middle-class fantasy. You have to look at the penumbra, where reasons end. You have to look at the ebbs and the flows.
NH: Which of these poems is held closest to your heart? Are there any in particular that were difficult to express with words?
CYX: Probably “Ars Poetica (When I keep learning you, something breaks).” When I moved to Paris, I had just finished two years of conscription in the army, and I got into my first ever residential writing workshop. I was really thirsting for community with people who were serious about poetry, and who also I could, like, kick it with. In Paris, I had attended this poetry workshop in the basement of a bar in 11eme, and it was full of these really unserious geezers, save for two friends whom I kept, Nico and Victor. But I got a grant to go to Kenyon, so I went, and there were these incredible poets with The Gift, and it was this gorgeous, alphabet-mafia-run, green oasis in the middle of Gambier, Ohio, and I felt like I was on the cusp of a new thing, and everyone was really funny, and we wrote and workshopped and had drinks, and I wrote “Ars Poetica” there. Then I did a road trip with my friends Aishvarya and Eileen back to New York. I mean, it was perfect. Kenyon changed my life for all kinds of reasons—it gave me my road trip buddies, and Will, Jessie, Imogen, Annalisa, Tangie—it threw a hammer into the heart of my poems and reconstituted whatever it touched. I was never the same again. The other one that’s close to my heart is “i think i call it dreaming, but,” but I’ll leave that story to the birds.
To answer your other question: “After the After” was difficult to write. The chemistry lab at my high school was this awful place, it felt like where all souls went to die. A couple of times, I went after playing football and everyone was sweaty, it was all cheap deodorant, like the Adidas kind from Queensway, with fruits in the name. I might be misremembering. I used to be terrible at lighting the Bunsen burner; I could never remember whether the hole had to be open or closed, and when we had to light a petri dish or something. I would turn around to chat shit with my friend, and by the time I turned back around, all the ammonium chloride would have disappeared, like an avoidant boyfriend, and I would be like, what? And have to redo the whole thing, including the bit about the Bunsen burner, and going like, what? And that’s what writing “After the After” felt like—I turned back around, and all my memories had disappeared.
So Rain is available to download online!
Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. His work has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, and New Singapore Poetries, 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, 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 holds a BA in Law from Cambridge.
Nafisa Hussain (she/her) holds a BSc in Anthropology and Sociology from Brunel University, where she primarily focused her work on race issues in the UK. She has published book reviews in the Hillingdon Herald Newspaper and volunteers for the Books2Africa charity.
