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.