7/3/2023 0 Comments Emergency contact review![]() Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.” Or you’re both & also a boy, like me, holding on. Or you must be the earthly representative of divine holding. You wrap your arms around me & it’s like you’re the patron saint of touch as well as soft sunlight & soothed dogs. You pick the sunflowers up, return them to their jar after refilling it with fresh tap water. (“a small book of questions: chapter iii”) How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? I think a lot about the fact that poetry (and art altogether) is about prefacing the world with questions that we may not consider in our lives, that for a brief moment, we're able to understand the paradigm of another person, to embody their physical space, to understand their livelihood. I especially love a small book of questions, the narrative pacing of it. ![]() The 1/2 star deduction is that sometimes I feel that the pieces lean too much into the idea of the poetic gay and feel a bit cheesy but HEY once again that's my subjective take on pieces that can mean anything to you. it's very real of having not accepting parents (not just the white part the whole being gay thing. I also love that as someone who has unfortunately dated a lot of white men up to this point. for example, the usage of penis vs dick vs all of the other ways that men are representing their genitalia. there is a way that he is able to make jargony words / things that would not typically be thought of as poetic feel rich in meaning. there are many pieces that are fantastic ( invited my parents to a dinner party and song of school) but I think overall, the way that he plays with form, aggressive diction, and the topics of the current day and age are somewhat magical. 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. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.Ībsolutely a slay, holy shit I think I'm in love with chen chen 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. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up. ![]() Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls. 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. What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? ![]()
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