2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
2024 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
2026 Kingsley Tufts Award WINNER
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."
About the Author :
Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
Review :
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
“Stillness, gaze, truth."—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“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
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
