Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

The Title as Argument

The title of Chen Chen’s second collection arrives as a kind of joke that is also an emergency: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. It captures the book’s characteristic register perfectly – absurdist on the surface, devastating underneath, and using the forms and phrases of bureaucratic modernity to do lyric work. Chen Chen is one of the most vital poets working in American poetry today, and this collection confirms everything that his debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017) announced. He has a wider range than almost any of his contemporaries, moving between camp comedy and genuine grief, between the mundane and the transcendent, with the ease of someone who has learned that these are not actually opposites.

Humor as a Formal Strategy

The collection’s humor is not ornamental but structural. Chen Chen understands that comedy is a way of approaching unbearable things sideways, and his jokes – about being gay, Chinese-American, awkward, in love, alive in the specific disaster of the present moment – are always doing double work. The poem that imagines getting a tattoo of someone’s name after the relationship has ended is both a perfectly observed comedy of regret and a meditation on how the body carries what the mind cannot. This double register, in which every joke is also an argument and every serious statement contains the ghost of a punchline, is the collection’s characteristic mode.

Family, Language, and Translation

Like his first collection, this book is deeply concerned with the complicated dynamics of Chen Chen’s Chinese-American family – with his parents’ immigration, with the specific grief of a child who has grown into someone his parents did not expect, with the ways love and disappointment and language are tangled together in the immigrant household. The poems about his mother are some of the most tender in the collection, finding in the imperfect communication between a mother and her queer son not just loss but a kind of love that persists despite and alongside misunderstanding. These poems refuse easy resolution in either direction – neither the fantasy of perfect understanding nor the drama of irreconcilable estrangement.

Queer Time and Queer Joy

Chen Chen’s poems are fully and non-apologetically queer in their concerns and their pleasures. They find in queer experience not primarily a site of trauma or struggle (though both are present and acknowledged) but a specific way of being in time and in relation: making chosen family, finding joy in unexpected places, living in a body that the world reads as other. The love poems to his partner are among the most genuinely joyful in the collection – not because they are uncomplicated but because Chen Chen is one of the few poets writing today who can render happiness as a serious subject without sentimental distortion.

The Political and the Personal

The collection was written during and after the Trump years and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and both are present – in the ambient dread of certain poems, in the specific texture of isolation and mutual aid, in the grief for what was lost and the ongoing question of what remains. Chen Chen is not a political poet in the manifesto sense; his politics emerge from the specific weight of life as he has lived it, in his particular body and community, which makes them more rather than less political. The personal is political not as slogan but as fact of form.

Form and Freedom

Chen Chen’s formal range is considerable – the collection includes long free-verse lyrics, compressed short poems, prose poems, poems that use lists and catalogs, poems that incorporate other languages. What unifies them is not form but voice: the unmistakable Chen Chen consciousness, curious and self-aware and capacious in its affections. He is a poet who has clearly read everything and absorbed nothing as anxiety, only as possibility. His poems sound like him and only like him.

Verdict

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency is a fully achieved second collection from a poet who is still growing into considerable powers. It is funnier, stranger, and more capacious than his debut, and it confirms Chen Chen as one of the essential voices in contemporary American poetry. Essential reading.

What is Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency about?

The collection ranges across Chen Chen’s characteristic preoccupations: family, queer identity, the pleasures and disasters of everyday life, love, loss, and the experience of being Chinese-American in the contemporary United States. It was written during the COVID-19 pandemic and reflects both the isolation of that period and the ongoing work of finding and sustaining community. The title poem literalizes the book’s central concern: who do we call when the person we would call is the one in crisis?

How does this collection compare to Chen Chen’s debut?

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017) was widely praised as one of the best debuts in recent American poetry and won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. This second collection is in many ways more mature – slightly less concerned with establishing itself, more willing to be strange and funny and to take formal risks. Both are essential; most readers find that the second collection rewards re-reading the first.

What is Chen Chen’s background?

Chen Chen was born in China and immigrated to the United States as a child. He grew up in Massachusetts and later studied at Syracuse University, where he received his MFA, and at Texas Tech University, where he completed a PhD. He teaches creative writing and is known for his generous mentorship of younger poets. His work draws on his experience as a gay, Chinese-American immigrant and on a wide range of literary traditions.

Is Chen Chen’s work appropriate for readers new to contemporary poetry?

Very much so. Chen Chen is one of the most accessible voices in contemporary American poetry precisely because his humor and emotional directness create immediate entry points. His poems do not require knowledge of literary tradition or the decoding of difficulty. They ask only that the reader be present and willing to laugh and feel. He is an excellent gateway into contemporary poetry for readers who found earlier or more academic poetry alienating.

What makes Chen Chen’s voice distinctive?

His voice is distinctive in its combination of genuine humor, genuine grief, and formal inventiveness – and in the way these three things are not separate but simultaneous. Chen Chen is one of the few poets writing today who can be genuinely funny without sacrificing depth, genuinely sad without sacrificing joy, and genuinely experimental without sacrificing accessibility. The combination is unusual and seems effortless, though it is of course the product of considerable craft.

How does the collection handle the pandemic?

The pandemic is present in the collection as an atmosphere rather than an explicit subject – in the texture of isolation and longing, in the specific quality of time during lockdown, in the intensified awareness of mortality and community. Chen Chen does not write pandemic poems in the documentary sense but rather poems that were written by a person living through the pandemic, which is a more honest representation of how historical crisis enters individual consciousness.

What awards has Chen Chen received?

Chen Chen is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at multiple major writing programs. His debut was a finalist for numerous prizes and won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency was longlisted for the National Book Award and received widespread critical acclaim.

Where can I read Chen Chen’s work online?

Chen Chen’s poems appear widely in literary journals including Poetry magazine, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and many others. Many are available through the Poetry Foundation website, which maintains a substantial archive of his published work. He is also active on social media and occasionally shares poems and excerpts in those spaces.