Chen Chen interviews & reviews for his second collection
'With its exquisite blend of melancholy and exuberance, this is a life-affirming book for our troubled times.’ – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian (Best recent poetry round-up)
In his second collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency - published by Bloodaxe in October 2022 - Chen Chen continues his exploration 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. With playfulness and irrepressible humour, 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 categorisations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another.
Chen Chen's debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was published in the UK by Bloodaxe in June 2019.
REVIEW COVERAGE
Wasafiri, Winter 2023
Chen Chen’s second poetry collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency was very well reviewed in the Winter 2023 issue of Wasafiri magazine.
‘In Chen Chen’s collection, the poet reveals the invisible, unjust bias against people’s racial and gender identities, revealing humour as a weapon in defending one’s identity and rights in society, the power of acceptance — both the giving and receiving of it. These poems call for a new way of interacting with poetic text, a text opaque with multilingual expressions and dialogues. They articulate love and tenderness within the family and across inter-generational divides.’ – Jennifer Wong, Wasafiri
In print.
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
Ink, Sweat & Tears, online 2 February 2023
Chen Chen’s second collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency was given an excellent in-depth review in the webzine Ink, Sweat & Tears on 2 February 2023.
‘A seasonal transformation takes place through the course of the collection. Like a clenched hand opening up, the book moves from a position of anxiety and fear towards a more generous, joyous and silly outlook… Chen uses humour to lessen the weight of the queer trauma – not to diminish it, but to survive it.’ – Helen Bowell, Ink, Sweat & Tears
Read online in full:
https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/the-school-of-try-again-in-praise-of-chen-chens-your-emergency-contact-has-experienced-an-emergency/
BOOKS OF THE YEAR FEATURES
Chen Chen's second collection was chosen for New Zealand's The Spinoff 's Christmas books feature of December 2022. The Bloodaxe edition is available in New Zealand (although the US edition is pictured in this feature). Read the feature here.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen is the pandemic-adjacent poetry collection you need in your life. Chen is a breathtaking wordsmith who pulls us together despite ourselves...' - The Spinoff (The great, late Christmas books guide 2022)
‘Always happy to recommend these titles: Molly Twomey, Raided by Vultures (Gallery Press)…and Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (Bloodaxe).’ – Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry News (Christmas Reading)
REVIEW COVERAGE
The Guardian, Best recent poetry round-up, Saturday 5 November 2022
Chen Chen’s second collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency has been given an excellent review in Mary Jean Chan’s November poetry round-up in The Guardian of 5 November 2022.
‘Chen Chen’s second collection displays his signature blend of humour and pathos set against a backdrop of the Trump presidency and the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and Covid racism. To be Asian American, Chen intimates, is to be taken “through the wound of it”. Throughout the collection, death, crisis and grief sit cheek by jowl with survival, resistance and glimpses of hard-won joy… With its exquisite blend of melancholy and exuberance, this is a life-affirming book for our troubled times.’ – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian (best recent poetry round-up)
In print on 5 November 2022 and online here.
Mary Jean Chan's review was reprinted in full in The Guardian Weekly of 11 November 2022.
‘This book is a wonder, grafting whimsy and seriousness; the elegiac and comic; the self-deprecatory and sublime. Formally interruptive and tonally subversive, here are poems mapping uncanny alternatives inside queerness, sonhood, confession, and the act of writing itself.’ – Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022, on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
'This collection is joyous, and celebratory. It takes the reader on a journey of self-expression and of hope. Above all, it is generous. The final poem... ends with the word 'Welcome'.' - SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon, on Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
ONLINE INTERVIEW WITH CHEN CHEN
bath magg, Issue #10, online 3 September 2022
An in-depth interview with Chen Chen features in issue 10 of the UK online poetry magazine bath magg. He was speaking to Joe Carrick-Varty about his forthcoming second collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, which is published in the US by BOA Editions in September and in the UK & Ireland by Bloodaxe Books in October 2022.
Read the interview here: https://www.bathmagg.com/interview10/
Three poems from Chen Chen's new collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency are featured in bath magg, along with audio of him reading them. Read and listen here.
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PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH CHEN CHEN
Craft Podcast, Season 1, Episode 2, online 15 December 2021
A half-hour interview with Chen Chen featured on episode 2 of the new Craft Podcast from Wasafiri magazine. He was speaking about ‘Nature Poem’ from his debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.
‘Chen Chen is an award-winning poet based in the United States. In this episode, he talks about the composition, editing, re-editing (and re-editing), process of his poem 'Nature Poem' published in his debut National Book award longlisted collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017 and Bloodaxe Books, 2019). On apocalyptic pineapples, giving yourself permission, and what writers can learn from Marie Kondo.’
Listen here.
Launch reading by Chen Chen, Brenda Shaughnessy and Ahren Warner, Tuesday 18 October 2022
This joint Bloodaxe launch reading by Chen Chen, Brenda Shaughnessy and Ahren Warner is now available on YouTube.
The poets read live and discussed their new collections with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live is now available to watch below.
[05 September 2022]
