Poetry Book Club: An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang

This monthly book club led by Doug Knowlton is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. November's selection is AN AUTHENTIC LIFE by Jennifer Chang.

We meet in person in the loft of our store in The Mark building at 117 South Pineapple Avenue. The cost is your purchase of the book ($17), which can be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist2024 National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistSprawling 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.

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 Asian American Literature and Culture, and The Volta. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.

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