Your Emergency Contact Has Experience..., Chen Chen
Your Emergency Contact Has Experience..., Chen Chen
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Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

Author: Chen Chen

Narrator: Chen Chen

Abridged: 2 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/20/2023


Synopsis

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 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. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls. Raucous 2 a.m. prank calls. Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up. With irrepressible humor and play, 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 categorizations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kim on April 25, 2024

This will be more personal than my usual reviews. But isn't the essence of poetry that it is personal? Let me say straightaway that this is a brilliant collection, a wry, refective, funny, anxious commentary on Chen's life experiences as a Queer Asian American man.  Chen Chen, where have you been? I'v......more

Goodreads review by Ivan on December 20, 2022

(4.5 stars rounded down) absolutely a slay, holy shit I think I'm in love with chen chen your emergency contact has experienced an emergency (which in itself is a fucking hilarious title and also kind of makes you think) is a mixture of pieces that lean into poetic form and break out of it. there are......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on September 25, 2022

17/10 All the things I love about Chen Chen in one place, over and over and over again. Humor, keen observations, questions that matter, allusions to dumb pop culture that makes the dumb pop culture more weighty, tracking how identity shifts, elegizing powerfully, imagining beauty, saying fuck you t......more

Goodreads review by Cozy Reading Times on August 31, 2024

4.5* I vibrant, provocative collection of intimate thoughts, encounters, memories, feelings. Talking about home, diaspora, relationships, family, growing up life. Asking and answering questions to and by the universe. Incredibly funny yet deeply moving, sometimes to tears. Really, quite beautiful.......more

Goodreads review by Christina on January 29, 2024

This was good because Chen Chen is good. Some of the poems didn't resonate with me because of form. Or lack of form? Anyway this is a subjective opinion and Chen Chen is still good. Five objective stars. One star has been removed subjectively. Total score: 4/5......more