Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency / Chen Chen / BOA Editions, September 2022 - $17 (Paperback)
Rarely do I encounter a work that speaks more to its zeitgeist than Chen Chen’s most recent poetry collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. While the subjects discussed are undeniably tragic—the racism Chen experiences as an Asian American, the Pulse nightclub shooting, his mother’s refusal to acknowledge his queer identity—the collection as a whole drips with sardonic humor. Chen manages to walk the fine line between mockery and hilarity without detracting from the collection’s impact. In order to do this, Chen references everything from Britney Spears to My NeighborTotoro to Costco, creating a familiarity between himself and the reader, as if to say “we’re in this mess together.” These moments center Chen firmly in our shared here and now, allowing Chen to highlight his perceived otherness (as a queer person, as an Asian American) while maintaining his position as a recognizable subject. Throughout the collection Chen is denied his humanity by his parents who wish him dead, the truck driver who cannot see him in the dark, the grocery clerk who sees him as only a contagion risk; yet, Chen responds with a humor and humility that leaves no gap between the public and private, bringing us into his own internal anguish and conflict. Chen’s mix of subject matter, from the brutality of violent death to the marveling of “whenever poop comes out as one true Platonic tube” (from “Winter [Big smelly bowel…]”), forefronts Chen’s shared humanity as a response to the multiple attacks meant to other him.
The work is almost beyond critique. It is simultaneously funny and deeply tragic, the kind of work to make you question the very boundaries of comedy and tragedy. If I were to offer one suggestion to Chen it would be that for all the discussions of his dog Mr. Rupert Giles, there is a shocking lack of photos, the addition of which would surely secure the collection as one of the best of our time.
--Cissa Barbosa