Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“Chen Chen is one of my favorite poets writing today. His intuitive sense of humor makes me laugh out loud while reading his poems which brim with pathos. Humor cross-sections a heart, coating it with laughter while also ripping it in half. Parents, higher education, Sarah McLachlan, ice cream sandwiches, Backstreet Boys, all transform in Chen's poems to become the props that they always were. I also love how Chen's poems pay homage to other Asian American poets—Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer S. Cheng, Justin Chin, Marilyn Chin, and more. Whether he is writing about his partner, his mother, his dog, racism, the pastoral, homophobia, or academia, Chen continually reminds us how he has the writing skills to subvert everything, even himself. With long-lined poems, prose poems, tercets, and more, here is a poet who isn't afraid to become fluent in forms. Ultimately, Chen's poems are honest, without the performative film that layers so much today, and his poems leave me speechless and transformed.”

— Victoria Chang, author of OBIT

“I loved reading these new Chen Chen poems. But why? Let me count the ways. Because in these Covid times when sitting alone in a room one especially wants to reach for the book that teaches us how not to be alone even when alone (‘I miss seeing your delight when touching pots & pans & potato mashers’), a book that fills the room with tragic comedies of our days. These poems can do so much, they can tell you, for example, ‘What bees wear at night / when they want to feel sexy,’ these poems can be hilarious, even when grieving, they can be realist even at their most surreal or absurdist moments (‘I have a canoe that gives me therapy my insurance won't cover’), they can be lively in the middle of elegies, perhaps maybe even especially in elegies. These poems are not afraid of feelings (‘In the ugly / teapot/uglier luggage section of your local / Dillard’s, you would like to scream’). These poems are memorable even when Chen Chen makes an offhand remark. And they are also utterly lyrical (‘as if the sky / were the only fact left, / as if the grackles have been told / to memorize it, as if someone, / someday, will ask them to // speak it, this long blue sentence’). These poems remember that they are written in the late empire, inside this grief that is America of early 2020s, and somehow these poems also console with all the things that grackles bring. Yes, the traumas of our times are here, yet these poems also somehow offer us a thousand delights—no one since Christopher Smart and TS Eliot has written as eloquently and as unpredictably about cats as Chen Chen. And that is just one example. There are so many others! Be surprised by ‘a slice of a watermelon bursting / between the teeth of a boy in a bathtub,’ be advised to ‘live a long life. Full / of blueberries & jade / blazers & dreams of ice skating in the nude // & ice skating in the nude.’ Forget the pale and stale ironists of the 1990s: here is a poet who is fully alive, irreverent, and just as well read & playful about it (‘You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation’). Indeed, these poems find their own 21st century way to contain multitudes (‘My song couldn't decide / what to get you, so here, / everything’). Anyone who has a boyfriend or a mother should read these poems. Anyone who’s ever been made uncomfortable in this country in public or in private should read them, too. Anyone who likes to laugh out loud and then realize that they have learned something far more than a joke: that they are wiser from reading the lines, that they have found a different kind of tonality of living: read these poems. Chen Chen is as real as poets can be. That is why I love this book.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“With humor, deep intelligence, and what feels to me like a luminous everyday philosophy, Chen Chen leads me “through the wound of it.” It being life. In America. In the 21st Century. In a body touched by violence and care, grief and desire, hope and heavy knowledge. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency is dolorous, riotous, rapturous.”

— Tracy K. Smith