In medieval philosophy, quintessence referred to the fifth and highest element, thought to imbue all of nature and to constitute the heavenly bodies. Chen Chen’s third collection of poetry considers the quintessences – the core elements – of contemporary life, not as fixed characteristics but as ever-evolving aspects of a soul, an insistently queer and creaturely one that doubts the existence of souls.
Ecstatic, elegiac, and erotic, these poems form a constellation of mortal loves and contradictions. Here, the celestial as well as the sacred are found in putting on a stunning denim jacket; speaking out against racism and homophobia; making a cup of tea, then promptly forgetting it; reconnecting with immigrant family; writing a letter by hand despite terrible handwriting; and asking a friend, 'Have you eaten yet?'
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 2019 and followed by Your Emergency Contact Has Just Experienced an Emergency in 2022.
Praise for Your Emergency Contact Has Just Experienced an Emergency:
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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 Olayiwola, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022
‘This second collection by the China-born poet continues his exploration of family – both blood and chosen – examining what one inherits and what one invents as a queer Asian American living through the era of Trump, mass shootings and pandemic.’ – The Bookseller (New Titles Non-Fiction: October 2022)
‘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 is one of my favorite poets writing today. His intuitive sense of humor makes me laugh out loud while reading his poems which brim with pathos. Humor cross-sections a heart, coating it with laughter while also ripping it in half. Parents, higher education, Sarah McLachlan, ice cream sandwiches, Backstreet Boys, all transform in Chen's poems to become the props that they always were. I also love how Chen's poems pay homage to other Asian American poets—Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer S. Cheng, Justin Chin, Marilyn Chin, and more. Whether he is writing about his partner, his mother, his dog, racism, the pastoral, homophobia, or academia, Chen continually reminds us how he has the writing skills to subvert everything, even himself. With long-lined poems, prose poems, tercets, and more, here is a poet who isn't afraid to become fluent in forms. Ultimately, Chen's poems are honest, without the performative film that layers so much today, and his poems leave me speechless and transformed.’ – Victoria Chang
‘These poems can do so much, they can tell you, for example, "what bees wear at night / when they want to feel sexy," these poems can be hilarious, even when grieving. These poems remember they are written in the late empire, inside this grief that is America of the early 2020s, and somehow these poems also console with all the things that grackles bring. Anyone who has a boyfriend or a mother should read these poems. Anyone who’s ever been made uncomfortable in this country in public or in private should read them, too. Anyone who likes to laugh out loud and then realise that they have learned something far more than a joke: that they are wiser from reading the lines: read these poems. Chen Chen is as real as poets can be.’ – Ilya Kaminsky
Praise for When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities:
‘Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’ blues, of Dickinson’s "so cold no fire can warm me" and of Michael Palmer’s comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life’s sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and – if we are willing to laugh at ourselves – humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I’ll be reading for the rest of my life.’ – Jericho Brown
‘Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities asks how one might find humour, hope and joy amid the tensions that arise from conflicting loyalties. Queer, Asian-American and immigrant experiences collide to inform Chen’s sensual and vivid verse which attests to the surreal and dream-like nature of memory… Following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, Chen reaches for the sublime by offering his reader the seemingly quotidian… Chen reminds us in this tender and free-wheeling debut that all relationships are “a feat of engineering”, whether with one’s country, one’s family, or oneself.’ – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian
‘In a world of bombastic corporate LGBT Pride and an America publicly grappling with immigrant difference and integration, this is essential reading for “love & forgiveness”…’ – Alex Pryce, The Poetry Review
‘Chen Chen’s poems continually surprise and delight me, with their luscious long lines and unfurling waves of imagery – from falling snow, to croissants, to Asian American sex symbols. Each time I come back to this collection I find something new; an image I read too quickly the first time, too hungry to take in the whole poem all at once. Some of my favourite, most tender love poems in the world live here in this book – love poems addressed not just to lovers but to parents, friends, food, and to the self.’ - Nina Powles, National Poetry Library Staff Picks Summer 2022
‘Chen Chen is already one of my favorite poets ever. Funny, absurd, bitter, surreal, always surprising, and deeply in love with this flawed world. I’m in love with this book.’ – Sherman Alexie
‘The radioactive spider that bit Chen Chen (isn’t that how first books get made?) gave him powers both demonic and divine. The bite transmitted vision, worry, want, memory of China, America’s grief, and People magazine, as well as a radical queer critique of the normative. What a gift that bite was – linguistic, erotic, politic and impolitic, idiosyncratic and emphatic. What a blessing and burden to write out of the manifold possibilities of that contact.’ – Bruce Smith
‘Chen balances the politics surrounding shame and desire with hearty doses of joy, humor, and whimsy in his vibrant debut collection. To consider the titular act of growing up – to recognise what potential could mean – Chen must make sense of his past to imagine a better future in his poems… As a gay, Asian-American poet, Chen casts his poems as both a refusal of the shame of sexuality and of centering whiteness or treating it as a highly desirable trait. Readers encounter sharp, delightful turns between poems, as Chen shifts from elegy to ode and back again… Moving between whimsy and sobriety, Chen both exhibits and defies vulnerability – an acute reminder that there are countless further possibilities.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘A book that is miraculous in all its pain, trauma, and humor… This is a book that is part elegy for the past and part love song for the future. This remarkable debut is hopefully the first of many possibilities to come.’ – Victoria Chang, Tupelo Quarterly
Chen Chen: PoetryLA Interview
Chen Chen is interviewed by Lisa Grove, discusses his work and reads poems from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.
Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order the US edition from BOA Editions
