An Authentic Life

Jennifer Chang

2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
2024 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
 
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.

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ISBN: 9781556596995

Format: Paperback

The Innocent

For weeks we watched for hatchlings to come
of three smug eggs tucked into a nest,
the nest tucked into the crook
of a neighbor’s honeysuckle. Time nodded,
was nodding—the shred of living, how offhand
the wind teeters toward erosion. Hard at work,
on guard in two backyards, the robins mothered
and fathered their territory daily. And beyond,
our block’s alley stretched, aimless as fields,
where watching happens by accident,
by nature. They’d squawk on a streetlamp,
a cedar fence, our back stoop, warning off
the tabby, my two young sons, everyone
stuck at home. I lost my mind with watching
and thought it grief or egotism, the bruise
of yesterday, not least the sky
unraveling another season. It was easy
to mistake the bared skeletal pinions
as lawn clippings, old leaves. That circle
in the grass, a massacre of feathers. That
terrible cat. It was easy to lose my mind.
One neighbor said, let’s not tell the children,
why know the world as always fated
toward remnant. Another said, go,
take the nest, set it under glass, and make it a lesson.
Instead, I watched our habits pass, the honeysuckle
fade from sickly sweet to nothing but heat.
Call it science. It’s summer again, and then
everything’s remnant. What did we do those days,
stuck at home, my sons might someday ask. We lived
or tolerated living. We looked away from death.

About the Author

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022, Georgia Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space, and Yale Review. Her essays on poetry and poetics, race, and culture have appeared in Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, New Literary History, the Oxford Encyclopedia of …

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Reviews

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

“True to her title, Chang uses the poems in An Authentic Life to hold her experiences against various received wisdoms, as a way to challenge convention and insist on authenticity. The topics range widely—war, religion, patriarchy, literary criticism—but the methods are the same: Chang cites some snippet she has learned or heard (‘my father turns philosophical again/which is to say wandering away from any self’), then wanders freely to debunk it, deploying her arguments with flashes of brilliant wit, flights of vivid imagery and rigorous self-questioning.”—New York Times

“As I read An Authentic Life, [Jennifer Chang’s] latest collection, I found my own mind whirring with her speakers between the lines. Her careful diction threads the lineages of power between fathers and ancient philosophers; home and war; the stories we tell and the stories we live. Throughout the book, Chang’s line shifts from poem to poem, eluding and surprising the reader in thought while also accumulating new ideas toward a larger question: how to find freedom within the constraints of history and sociopolitical conditions? Is it even possible? What Chang offers are not answers, but definitions toward dissolution. That is, to read An Authentic Life is to experience statements of suspension, a refusal to let go of the question, and to embrace what we do have that exceeds finality and enclosure: what friendship is, or a grove of trees.”—Yanyi, Adroit Journal

“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

“Stillness, gaze, truth.”—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine