In a body touched by violence and care, grief and desire, hope and heavy knowledge. “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. 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: read these poems. Anyone who’s ever been made uncomfortable in this country in public or in private should read them, too. Anyone who has a boyfriend or a mother should read these poems. These poems remember they are written in the late empire, inside this grief that is America of the early 2020s, and somehow these poems also console with all the things that grackles bring. “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. Ultimately, Chen's poems are honest, without the performative film that layers so much today, and his poems leave me speechless and transformed.” With long-lined poems, prose poems, tercets, and more, here is a poet who isn't afraid to become fluent in forms. 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. Cheng, Justin Chin, Marilyn Chin, and more. I also love how Chen's poems pay homage to other Asian American poets-Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer S. Parents, higher education, Sarah McLachlan, ice cream sandwiches, Backstreet Boys, all transform in Chen's poems to become the props that they always were. Humor cross-sections a heart, coating it with laughter while also ripping it in half. His intuitive sense of humor makes me laugh out loud while reading his poems which brim with pathos. “Chen Chen is one of my favorite poets writing today. " These questioning, funny, and deeply humane poems pack a fantastic punch." If you’re never going to tell me the meaning of life Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.Įxcerpt from "we’ll be gone after these brief messages" Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorizations and pat answers. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up.
Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls.
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic. What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?
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