Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

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. With unexpected playfulness and irrepressible humour, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. 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. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another. Chen 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.