Chen Chen

Chen Chen will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions.

In his highly anticipated second collection of poems, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, 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. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form, 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.

“With humor, deep intelligence, and what feels to me like a luminous everyday philosophy, Chen Chen leads me ‘through the wound of it.’ It being life. In America. In the 21st Century. In a body touched by violence and care, grief and desire, hope and heavy knowledge. Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency is dolorous, riotous, rapturous.” — Tracy K. Smith

Chen Chen’s debut book of poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His book of essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2023. He teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.

Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation:

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

This is a hybrid event held at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave Rochester, NY and streamed via Zoom.

Masks are required for on-site attendance.