An Authentic Life

Name: An Authentic Life
Brand: Copper Canyon Press
Price: 29.25 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

By: Jennifer Chang

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Paperback | 22 January 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
112 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
15.2 x 22.8

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$29.25

Available: 22nd January 2025

Preorder. Will ship when available.

Jennifer Chang investigates patriarchy, violence, and grief with an unwavering eye, a powerful voice, and a boundless heart.

Sprawling yet urgent, probing yet assured, the poems in Jennifer Chang's 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. In "A Conversation Between Women," friends sip wine and question the "despite-ness" of love and marriage. In poems where the lyric is reimagined and burst open, Chang fearlessly confronts the patriarchal systems and teachings that once held power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life seeks a world where women can begin "to unlearn everything," to reclaim our voices and autonomy and speak.

Industry Reviews

"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

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