States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay’s hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravelling—a leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. “I am catapulted into where I am,” he writes, “and the air concusses around me.”

Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days. It is a debut like no other.