Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation,” says the speaker, of himself, in Chen Chen’s second collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. With his raffish attraction to “floral shorteralls,” “deeply pink fanny pack,” and “branded touchless experiences,” the speaker, who goes by the author’s own name, feels like a hard-earned construct, a neon-bright, pop-consumerist confection surrounding a chilled core of outrage over the bigotry, homophobia, and loathing that he encounters from strangers, lovers, his parents, and even himself:

The fact that I can’t write “white” without thinking of my list of white men. Of my first boyfriend, his bright white teeth as he said, I like your eyes, they’re not really chinky eyes. The way I said, Thank you. 

Chen’s ice cream sandwich connoisseur is inseparable from his indignant, queer, Asian poet: both arise from a maximalist sensibility, more “from Whitman” than “from Dickinson,” that ironically expresses the difficulty of self-acceptance through audacious assertions of pride in his identities (“My poetics of deepthroat & tonguefuck”). Although I wanted at times something hushed and solitary as respite from the book’s gregarious “emergencies,” I especially admired Chen’s pained and always frank accounts of his conflict with his parents about his sexuality and life choices. For Chinese Americans who know some written Chinese, the poem “After My White Friend Says…” is a tour de force of the elementary phrases like “她要问我什么?” (what is she trying to ask me?) that our immigrant parents muttered in white people’s presence, reinforcing familial ties at the expense of outsiders. And I melted when, after many estrangements over Chen’s gayness, his mother makes a gesture of reconciliation in the Chinese manner, with food:

She’s picking up two magnificently crispy scallion pancakes—their full magnificence held between her chopsticks, her skillfully nonchalant grip—& then she’s placing them on the boyfriend’s plate. She looks at me. Says, For him.