Welcoming Spotlight Poet Jennifer Chang
The New Hampshire Book Festival is thrilled to welcome Jennifer Chang as our spotlight poet!
Jennifer Chang’s most recent book An Authentic Life was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other honors include the William Carlos Williams Award, the Levinson Prize, and fellowships to the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She has published poems in the American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Texas in Austin, is the poetry editor of New England Review, and serves on the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit dedicated to writers and readers of Asian American literature. An Authentic Life (2024) is her third poetry collection, following The History of Anonymity (2008) and Some Say the Lark (2017).
Chang’s work is known to explore nature and the pastoral, but her latest collection dives into the darker scenery of war and patriarchy. She feels deeply about the current state of the world and does not hesitate to express such in her poetry. She is, as she says, “a very slow writer” (Adroit Journal), but this is because she is a very thoughtful writer. Her poetry beautifully weaves together thought and feeling, as her poems in An Authentic Life draw on her “experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation” (“An Authentic Life”).
Chang’s poems work to define the divide between opposites: thought and feeling, the self and the other, the private and the public, justice and injustice, sound and silence, apocalypse and utopia. But that’s the trick. She masterfully lures her readers to the edge, guiding them through line break after line break, manipulating the white space of the page to form around the ink of her words—and then she leaves them there. To simmer, to wonder, to form line breaks of their own. A large element of Chang’s work is the fragmentedness of it, which she describes in a conversation with The Adroit Journal: “A fragment isn’t just about the brokenness of poems, which are broken by lines and broken because they’re inherently incomplete. A fragment gestures to a larger thing, a story; a life; a history” (Adroit Journal). Chang’s poetry brings her readers to the edge of that larger thing and leaves them to wonder and seek it out for themselves.
Chang studied with acclaimed poet Charles Wright at the University of Virginia, where she admired the fragmentedness of his poetry, and its effect on a poem’s rhythm. In her own work, she uses line breaks and indentations to create a visual and audible rhythm. The relatively broken nature of her poems reflects her thought process, giving her readers insight into how her thoughts have developed throughout each poem. She treats line breaks and indentations like rests in music, each pause purposeful and critical to the rhythm and flow of the music. The musicality of her poems adds to each emotional beat and turn, playing like music down the page.
Most of all, the fragmentedness of Chang’s poetry reflects her notion that “There is no cohesiveness to a self” (Adroit Journal). Each of her poems’ speakers is unique, yet they all derive from the same person. Chang’s multitude of speakers expresses the complexity of individuals and calls attention to the many identities we all contain. As Chang notes, “trying to figure out what it means to be Asian and what it means to be American has been a lifelong meditation … essentially about whether I am authentically Chinese” (Adroit Journal). Navigating these questions of identity and self are, of course, a large part of what An Authentic Life is about.
Come listen to Jennifer Chang read on Saturday, October 4 with an introduction by NH Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello!
—Faith Guttman