A few winters ago, my first break of grad school, I read a book every day. I stopped keeping a list of books I wanted to read. Instead, I went to the library every two days and wandered the stacks, deciding to read whatever felt most urgent. That next month changed my perspective on reading — turning it again from a thing of routine to a thing of joy. I rediscovered something that I hadn’t quite felt since I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, finishing my homework quickly in school to read novels under my desk so that my teacher didn’t see.

I read Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) in December; the semester had just ended, and it felt longer than it had been. I’d had two theory heavy seminars and a workshop where we wrote ten pages a week. Literature had begun to feel heavier once again, like it had my first semester of graduate school. Thinking about books with others felt like it took up more time in the everyday of my life than my own thinking about books, the joy of the relationship just between oneself and the text. I left Northampton as soon as I could, visiting my parents in Philadelphia. I wanted to read for myself again, to discover anew myself, to think about what moved me. Settling into the winter in Philadelphia, I read An Authentic Life to embark once again on a winter of reading, a winter of immersing myself in literature that would move me. In Chang’s poems, I found something necessary and urgent in how she articulates the making of the self.

Opening with an epigraph from a Buddhist koan, “Not knowing is most intimate,” An Authentic Life is a search/ing for meaning amidst not knowing. In these poems, Chang grapples with the unknowability of daughterhood, and what it means to make a life in service of language, of art in a world that is shaped by violence. These poems are expansive and full of possibility, gesturing at the impossibility of language, of parenthood and daughterhood.

The poetry demonstrates how we can only gesture at affect in language, and never fully articulate it. Impossibility and possibility are both contained in An Authentic Life. The collection stretches the boundaries of what is within reach of language: how can one articulate oneself authentically, when language is so intertwined in violence, when language betrays a complicity with war?

In the opening poem of the collection, “The Poem of Force,” Chang’s speaker opens with a reflection outward: “What is that man doing? / He has been crouched in that corner for an eternity[.]” (p. 5) Situating ourselves first in observation, Chang draws our attention to how we look outwards. Further into the poem, of this same man, Chang writes that he is “gazing into the space / between us, a window / onto somewhere else, not here [.]” (p. 5) This gazing, this articulation of the space between oneself and another forms the crux of what Chang desires. She examines how these gaps are created, how they become both real and unreal, and allow us to understand anew our relationships to others.

At the center of this collection is this speaker’s relationship to her mother; daughterhood is the driving force of the book, the momentum that propels this speaker forward. History, in Chang’s voice, is both familial and global, simultaneously restrained and expansive. In these poems, Chang makes visible the way language exacts historical meaning; across generations, across time. The paternal relationship is shaped by the loss of the speaker’s mother. This ensuing grief presents as the gap between self and the father as other; the abyss of her mother’s loss is always present, drawing a boundary around what she is willing to reveal to the other.

In the poem “An Essay on War,” Chang most sharply articulates the loss of the speaker’s mother, how this carries across geography, across time. Loss in not linear, and neither is history in Chang’s work. Instead, it is a condition of diaspora, a condition of cyclical time. “I will sweep the floor/ when my mother dies / I will miss her and / not call her,” (p. 43) she writes early in the poem. We see the tensions of temporality at work; the foreclosure of loss in the certainty of “when,” as well as how the speaker situates the loss of the intimacy of the everyday too in this certainty of loss.

Grief necessitates the loss of everyday intimacy. Further in the same poem, Chang writes: “In my mind I am at war / with images, my mother brazenly / unsmiling in a photograph.” (p. 43) Here, documentation plays a vital role: the contrast of the abstraction of memory to the tangibility of the photograph, the suspension it creates of a moment in time, marked forever. The poem continues: “I read about a family / photograph, the son long gone, / the mother years into a second language, second life…” (p. 45) The photograph, and its concrete marking of person, place, and space becomes a way for Chang to draw out the contrast between the affective experiences of motherhood and daughterhood and the concreteness of the photograph, perceived, in a sense, as more real in its archival quality.

In the last lines of the poem, Chang writes: “My mother was born in a war, / outlasted wars I studied / and wars I never heard of. / Never saw. My whole life.” (p. 46) She reminds us again of her project here — to gesture to the familial histories that shape us, but to also situate us in the larger histories they belong to.

In a later poem, “On the Soul” continues this investigation of the speaker’s familial relationship with her mother that shapes her, that is central to how she understands herself, both in relation to the world and her children. “Miles away, my mother abides / the endless rooms of winter [,]” writes Chang (p. 65). Here in articulating the separation of the speaker’s parents, the evocative sense of image is central as we grapple with the loneliness at the heart of this collection. The speaker, in all her reckoning with family and the violence of language that ensues in its ruptures, is ultimately always seeking to understand the gap between self and world.

In the poem “Is Not,” Chang writes: “the space between myself / and the world / is an ever fixed mark[.]” (p. 55) This articulation demonstrates a startling clarity as she thinks through what it means to exist in relation to the world; collapsing world into self is impossible, and there is always a gap between want and possibility even as she tries her best to cross it.

I read An Authentic Life in one sitting, there was something propulsive about its incisiveness and clarity of language, even as it reckons with its fundamental unknowability. In one of the last poems in the collection, “Letter to Capitol Hill,” Chang writes: “What to do with this grief? // This letter I never sent?” (p. 93) The starkness of this question, and the sharpness with which it is articulated speaks to the centrality of how language functions in Chang’s work. Family and language converge in these questions; centering ambiguity, the impossibility of answering, the unknowability of grief and of language. In this book, expression is both limitless and necessarily bounded; the gaps between self and world, affect and word are always present, always anchoring us as we move through time and space.

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An Authentic Life ~ Copper Canyon Press

Poetic Conversations: What is within reach of language? On Jennifer Chang’s “An Authentic Life” was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.