Through analysis of Mario Verdugo's work Apologia de la droga, this article intends to define a way of constituting what we will call emerging literature, understood as a aesthetic critical discourse that opens discursive tensions between peripheral and central strata of a literary system, in our case, the Chilean poetic system. We review the majority uses given in literary studies to the "emerging" category, to specify its limits and contours in pursuit of a redefinition that, we propose, allows expanding the analytical possibilities of the concept. Our proposal is based on the systemic postulates of Williams and Even-Zohar, mainly.