Interview with poet Eric Yip

Eric Yip is a poet and writer from Hong Kong. He won the 2021 National Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Guardian, Oxford Poetry, and The Poetry Review. His debut pamphlet is forthcoming with ignitionpress in 2024.

What are your discoveries in this process of exchanging ideas with another poet?

It's enlightening, humbling, and great fun. For many months R.A. Villanueva and I exchanged voice notes on WhatsApp, and the conversation got so long that we had to trim it down significantly for the anthology! Writing started as (and still is) something deeply solitary for me, so it's great to be reminded of the necessity of companionship. Seeing the brilliance of other poets makes the possibility of poetry seem brighter.

What are your favourite books (poetry/fiction/non-fiction) written by queer writers?

I'm a huge fan of Padraig Regan's work; their poems are not so much about queer matters directly but rather oblique embodiments of queerness in food, art, nature etc. Henri Cole is one of my favourite lyric poets; I find his sonnets inimitable and electric to the soul.

Read Eric's poem 'Fricatives' https://poetryschool.com/articles/eric-yip-how-i-did-it-fricatives/