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Emergency contact book pdf4/24/2023 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 on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency 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. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency is dolorous, riotous, rapturous.’ – Tracy K. 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". 'These questioning, funny, and deeply humane poems pack a fantastic punch.' - Publishers Weekly ‘This second collection by the China-born poet continues his exploration of family – both blood and chosen – examining what one inherits and what one invents as a queer Asian American living through the era of Trump, mass shootings and pandemic.’ – The Bookseller (New Titles Non-Fiction: October 2022) Olayiwola, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022, on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency Formally interruptive and tonally subversive, here are poems mapping uncanny alternatives inside queerness, sonhood, confession, and the act of writing itself.’ – Oluwaseun S. ‘This book is a wonder, grafting whimsy and seriousness the elegiac and comic the self-deprecatory and sublime. Like a clenched hand opening up, the book moves from a position of anxiety and fear towards a more generous, joyous and silly outlook… Chen uses humour to lessen the weight of the queer trauma – not to diminish it, but to survive it.’ – Helen Bowell, Ink, Sweat & Tears, on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency ‘A seasonal transformation takes place through the course of the collection. Throughout the collection, death, crisis and grief sit cheek by jowl with survival, resistance and glimpses of hard-won joy… With its exquisite blend of melancholy and exuberance, this is a life-affirming book for our troubled times.’ – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian (best recent poetry round-up), on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency To be Asian American, Chen intimates, is to be taken “through the wound of it”. ‘Chen Chen’s second collection displays his signature blend of humour and pathos set against a backdrop of the Trump presidency and the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and Covid racism. ‘Always happy to recommend these titles: Molly Twomey, Raided by Vultures (Gallery Press)…and Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (Bloodaxe).’ – Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry News (Christmas Reading) Chen is a breathtaking wordsmith who pulls us together despite ourselves.' - The Spinoff (The great, late Christmas books guide 2022) Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen is the pandemic-adjacent poetry collection you need in your life. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another.Ĭhen Chen's debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was published in the UK by Bloodaxe in 2019. 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 categorisations and pat answers. With unexpected playfulness and irrepressible humour, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his exploration 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.
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