So Rain, Christian Yeo Xuan

“The presence lingers long after the body leaves…. It’s not a place if you haven’t place-made. / It’s not a homeland if it’s not a home.”

So Rain, the chapbook debut by Singaporean-based poet Christian Yeo Xuan, is an evocative collection overflowing with love, grief, and a hunger for home that transcends geographic boundaries. Offering an intimate look into the speaker’s migratory relationships with himself and his communities in the past and present—from sepia-toned friendships lost in Singapore parks, to long-distance loved ones scattered across the cosmopolitan Global North—these poems explore the crossroads of individual and collective identity, inherited and chosen family, and belonging in a contemporary global order. The speaker contends with the simultaneous nostalgia for and trauma of boyhood, the loneliness that exists within collective cultures, and the desperate longing for human connection. Here, the speaker seeks “the weakness of human love” from a bird who does not believe in weakness, while in another scene, mourns the loss of a relationship, the destruction of a forest for a single tree. So Rain illustrates the desire for community and love in an interconnected world, resonating with all of us who endlessly search for them.

“I understand the poem is a container,” says the speaker at the end of one poem that fabulously “lacks focus.” Indeed, these are poems in which to meander is to magic. Christian Yeo Xuan is a poet who understands that the poem is a container that doesn’t contain but overflows, constantly, ceaselessly. And what is spilled is not confession but contradiction and constellation. Rather than linear disclosure, the poet gives us birds, a “bulldozer lord,”  music festivals, a “week of roses,” more birds, an elegy called Boyhood, a “beluga god” and an “oblong god.” I could say this whip-smart and weirdly wise collection is about masculinity and loneliness. I could say it’s about families and geographies. Yes, yes, all true, though it’s also about the sound grief makes when it sees something beautiful that it just needs to add to its nest.”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency 

“Christian Yeo Xuan’s poems in So Rain are varied in form, joyfully influenced by many other poets, yet they are distinctively their own beings–quietly powerful with recurring themes of inheritance, family, masculinity, memory, and survival. I’m impressed by Xuan’s ability to wield an image: “The bullet lays roots in the finger/like a tree,” or “i hear her breathe/on the line like an oxen.” Ultimately, these heartfelt and vulnerable poems are at the cusp of everything, including narrative, only momentarily beguiled by it. These poems travel “past the raindrops” on their own road trip toward a full life of beauty and survival.”
—Victoria Chang, author of OBIT and With My Back to the World

“One of the many things I love about the poems in this remarkable collection is the ways they make me realize that my heart and my intellect are not separate at all. In fact it is the heart of my mind that helps me stay alive that helps me not look away from the brutality of the world, from the war machine. These poems of rigorous and vulnerable intellectual interrogation are also poems that open their arms to the most profound desire to survive and love and to see others do the same: