An Authentic Life

by Jennifer Chang

Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.

Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the “despite-ness” of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin “to unlearn everything.”

Paperback | 112 pages | Copper Canyon Press | 2024

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, Some Say the Lark, and An Authentic Life, which will be published in October 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022, The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space, and Yale Review and has been honored with fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency and with the William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. She is the poetry editor of New England Review.