An Authentic Life

by Jennifer Chang

An Authentic Life is an exacting and fearless interrogation of the education one receives from the institutions of academia and family.

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.”

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2024

About the author

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

Critical Mass Interview:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/S...

Boston Review:
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/chang_...

First Book Interviews:
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.c...

Cortland Review Book Review:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/3...

Poetry Daily:
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=13702
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14001

Reviews

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

love the idea, felt lukewarm on the execution.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 3 out of 5]

I left my review until after I had time to see and hear the author in Houston. But this didn't change anything. I found the poems...lacking. That's the softest word I can come up with. I'm not a literature expert; I know what I like, though. These poems were cold to me. They felt shaped. Nothing resonated.

I hate writing these thoughts down. It is probably just me.

[Lily Poppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this especially towards the latter end but the first half was tricky and a bit too esoteric. Lots of insider references but I like “The Years” a lot and the line:

“that solitude is the mind adrift / is the mind on open water / hoping for a catch betting against rain”

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfection.

[Lucy]

favs: “letter to capitol hill,” “time, rampant and flourishing,” “the innocent,” “an essay on war”

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I have often admired in Chang’s work is this central lyric concern. Or a fountain of lyric thinking that starts, say, with a juxtaposition between “ocean” and “anonymity.” That generates a loosened sense power of observation. Like it’s the the poet’s stance on reality. It reminds me of Larry Levis writing in The Gazer Within that poets should look at the world with the gaze of an animal. And I always imagine him in a small Midwestern town; it’s winter, and he’s looking over a median of dead grass. Like an animal would have this anchored position, but they don’t even know what “anchored” would mean. Their looking is just what or who the animal is. In Chang’s previous books, I could feel the poet in that rarefied position, that life, observing the world to me. The certain light she could see in the world, and what she understood about the world may or may not have changed after having seen what she’s seen. It’s a structured discursiveness. Meaning, it’s aware there is something for the voice to say, but it plans to pursue that something at a relaxed gait.

I was struck, then, by the poems opening An Authentic Life. It’s like they knew what they were supposed to be writing about. And it mainly revolved around her relationship with her father. Which is assuredly a collection of conflicted feelings or unresolved moments that haven’t settled into what “stable relationship” would mean to her. These opening poems in An Authentic Life occupied a more prosaic muscling. Aware of the father, like they’re occupying the same physical space. Like they’re together, even when they’re not actually in the same space. It fits, in fact, with a theme addressing what it means to move from childhood to adulthood. The poems remark not only on the poet’s life as a daughter, but also her life as a mother.

And I think once the poems establish some of the more important and emotionally textured tenets, as they shift into the second section, that fountain of lyric thinking returns. The more noticeable sentimentality from the opening poems, a troubled sentimentality that can complicate the poem’s drive forward, draws an impactful context. And that lyric sentiment appears with surprising juxtapositions. Like in “The Age of Unreason,” thoughts on her father are arranged with thoughts on war. But in this case the subject of war is something more relevant than just the soldiers who were involved with the physical violence and murder of war. War is portrayed as something more than the specific windows of time history might assign to it. It’s the long shadow war marks on countries and the people living there. In “The Age of Unreason” Chang thinks through the implications of a school shooting from 1989, where the killer used his reasoning about the Vietnam War as rationale for killing children of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.

And what I leave the book thinking is: What constitutes an authentic life for the poet? Is her childhood authentic in the way she has learned authenticity from outside sources? From friends or even acquaintances she remembers meeting once, which she describes in “A Lunch Date.” And how can a reader think through a lyric voice that feels authentic, drawing towards a thinking that feels most true to the poet, all while the poet reveals a many-faceted consideration of what she’s heard authenticity should be. And how many of those facets would seem to be contradicting it.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book of poetry but I wouldn’t say it wowed me. My favorite poems were the ones about being a mother. I’m not a mother so I don’t have a particular bias toward that subject matter. I just felt those were Chang’s best. She writes in free verse that sometimes employs long lines and sometimes short lines. Though much of the poems are left aligned, some of them escape the left margin and roam the white space. She frequently dispenses with punctuation and sometimes her enjambments can be jarring. Some of her poems refer to Plato so if you’ve read him recently there may be subtleties you’ll catch that I missed. She has three “Dialogues” poems and one on the death of Socrates. But there’s also a poem about life during the pandemic and one about surviving suicide, so this is not a book focused on a particular theme. It struck me as a book of a competent poet still finding her footing and the ground she wants to walk.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jennifer Chang's An Authentic Life is an approachable book of poetry that—counterintuitively—looks its best at a distance.

Chang excels at building a thematically coherent collection, crafting a book about patriarchy that is situated in something like Simone de Beauvoir's concept of woman as "the negative." Across the body of work, we gradually get a picture of the feminine through what the speaker defines and describes as the masculine.

That said, most of the individual poems are not particularly distinctive or memorable, and I was a bit disappointed that they don't fulfill the book's premise unless readers engage with the work as a whole. This is really a single-sitting read, and you'll find few pieces that linger with you beyond the page. Some great exceptions are "Dialogues: (Against God)" and "The Last Horse I Rode."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25.

Finished this lovely poetry book and I adored it. I think Chang has a remarkable way of conveying vast topics surrounding living, existing, dying, and perceiving. Chang features poems surrounding American exceptionalism, the patriarchal norms impacts and its negative implications, and how we convey love in a modern society. I particularly bookmarked “Hydrangeas,” “The Death of Socrates,” “The Age of Unreason,” “The Lonely Humans,” and “A Lunch Date.” These poems spoke to me the most but I will say that this entire read was so phenomenal.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I could only have the opening line and the closing line of each poem this would have been a 5 star poetry book. Even the cover is intriguing and promises... more.

Even reading aloud I would lose myself. No punctuation, no line breaks, just never ending verbiage that doesn't piece together. It is disorienting.

I'm a big fan of poetry just not a fan of this one and would not recommend to others.

[Marie Polega · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book of poetry difficult. Although the wording was often beautiful, I had trouble understanding much of it.

I think I would have appreciated these poems more if I had been able to listen to them. At our book club meeting, a few of the poems were read aloud and they worked better for me spoken than as words on a page.

I might give this one another try, reading it more slowly, just a few poems a day, rather than rushing through it to finish on time.

[T Cruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this during my final semester of grad school. A great guide in crafting my creative thesis/capstone. From studying the cover to studying what lies within the pages, Chang has so much to offer us as student of craft, voice, and form.

[Gwendolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the complexity of the language in this collection. Many poems are not easy to decipher and reward close study. There’s so much to unpack here. A collection I could see myself rereading in the future.

[Ginny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these I loved, and some left me feeling “eh.” I did get to hear the author do a reading in town several weeks ago, and I enjoyed them more when read aloud by her!

[Samantha]

Recommended by Jess Archer

[Sunny Butterfield]

“hydrangea” sent to steve and wally❤️

[Heather Neidlinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great lyricism in here. I love the dream like quality to this collection, as well - I can definitely see why this book was a Pulitzer finalist.

[Maria Hiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

💫

[Iso · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is a park or it is a forest. It is older than any heart.” AGHHHHHHHHH

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

from "A Conversation between Women": "We call that love, the despite-ness. / As if by being senseless, the heart becomes brave."

[Elisabetta La Cava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and smart!