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 Changs 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 authoramp8217s experiences as a mother as the daughter of immigrants and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.amp160Here 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 amp8220despitenessamp8221 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 amp8220to unlearn everything.amp8221