An Authentic Life
Jennifer Chang
(Author)
Description
2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
2024 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
An Authentic Life is an exacting and fearless interrogation of the education one receives from the institutions of academia and family.
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."
Product Details
| Publisher | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publish Date | October 15, 2024 |
| Pages | 112 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781556596995 |
| Dimensions | 8.9 X 5.9 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Praise for An Authentic Life
2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
2024 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Reflective poems that fuse ancient philosophy with contemporary language and an immigrant perspective in a quest to find truth in the western world."--Pulitzer Prize Finalist Judges' Citation
"Moving through family narratives, childhood memory, and collective hardship, Jennifer Chang's third collection is lyrical and grounding. Chang's contemplative voice is equal parts comforting and unsettling, forcing us to question along with her our beliefs and understanding of the world and our connection to identity."--Turi Sioson, Only Poems
"Chang dives deeply into patriarchy and war, politics and parenting, religion and philosophy in poems about physical peril as well as 'the ache that is all / mind.' Her search for the power of truth and the truth of power is uncompromising."--David Starkey, California Review of Books
Praise for Jennifer Chang
"A piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination."--Natasha Tretheway
"The language of Some Say The Lark carries the same delicate aggressiveness of poets like Sylvia Plath or Frank O'Hara, mixed with the detached appreciation of nature and beauty of Mai Der Vang. But the poems speak with such self-authority that the influences remain firmly in the distant background."--Frontier Poetry
"Her refusal to attempt to charm her readers with false epiphany, her ruptured syntax, her meditations on sorrow and failure, break her into an arena truly original [...] Chang reinvigorates the lyric, and comes closer, perhaps, to the oracular or prophetic."--West Branch
"The plaintive, beautifully cadenced poems in Jennifer Chang's first book range from psalms and essays to endnotes and excerpts from an imagined text. While formally diverse, the collection is unified by an ongoing engagement with the natural world, with Chang often presenting forests, rivers, and vast seaside landscapes as loci for her speakers' search for self-knowledge and authenticity."--Boston Review
"[Chang has] a poetic style that is wild, unfettered and unpredictable, yet devastatingly precise in the emotions it dredges up. Chang is a poet who merges the abstract and the concrete with fierce, visceral energy."--Shelf Awareness
Earn by promoting books
