States of Emergency

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.

Reviews

“Yoyo Comay’s States of Emergency strikes as playful and precise; a lyrically-dense debut of hush and urgency, screeching calm across such restless, incredible silence.”—rob mclennan

“For Yoyo Comay, poetry is an emergency room where the body of the human being and the world, torn apart, riddled with fear, can seek respite, kind hands, perhaps even healing. States of Emergency shivers with the voice of a unique new poet of relentlessly clear, if violent, vision.”—A.F. Mortiz

“Yoyo Comay’s States of Emergency is a soul-cry whittled into a dagger: this long form poem, visceral to its core, gives off the heat of an open wound. A descent into a controlled madness where ‘harmonies of disaster/thaw and hatch.’ A most assured debut.”—Michael Redhill

“Yoyo Comay’s power to turn a phrase, however enigmatic, is startling. Reading States of Emergency, I feel like an oboe player encountering Jimi Hendrix.”—Richard Greene