I first read Chen Chen, his poem The School of Eternities in the 2021 Best American Poetry. It was my favorite poem in the book and was my favorite poem period for a long time after that. I finally read his book Your Emergency Contact is Having an Emergency where it’s part of a larger collection of poems telling a story.
This poetry book is in four sections, and after I finished the first section, I was very unimpressed. Almost quit reading the book honestly. It just didn’t grab me. But I pressed on and the book really started to unfold in a beautiful way. Each part revisited the themes of the first (love, relationship with mother, queerness, race, identity, grief and death) and visited many of the same metaphors and images (is it on or in? call me back before it’s too late, a near-death experience with a truck) adding layers, uncovering new layers, telling a story of Chen Chen’s experience of being alive or dead, whatever it may be. By the end I was completely blown away by the consistency of voice, and the control of language and images in Chen Chen’s work. I loved this book. Because his language is so accessible, it seems simple and unpolished, but the deeper you get into this book the more you uncover what’s happening behind the scenes.