Some Say the Lark - by Jennifer Chang (Paperback)

About the Book

These poems carry hope for future generations to find American life less forbidding and divisive than the poet.

Book Synopsis

Chang's poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history.

From "The Winter's Wife"

I want wild roots to prosper

an invention of blooms, each unknown

to every wise gardener. If I could be

a color. If I could be a question

of tender regard. I know crabgrass

and thistle. I know one algorithm:

it has nothing to do with repetition

or rhythm. It is the route from number

to number (less to more, more

to less), a map drawn by proof

not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not

conclude with darkness. I conclude.

Review Quotes

"Chang is fearless in taking on traditional notions of what poetry can do to the self and to the natural world."
--Los Angeles Review of Books

"[Chang's] voice has reached a new maturity and internal-intimacy, daring a tireless and vulnerable look at the winter of scattered selves."
--Frontier Poetry

"[In Some Say the Lark], each dynamic formal shift, each nimble swing in register, reveals a different kind of quiet; a fresh consideration of familiar attempts to 'redress sorrow' in a way that is more real and true."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Nothing is settled in these poems full of questions only falling snow can ask."
--Minnesota Public Radio

"[Some Say the Lark is] 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

"The ambitious and heartfelt second volume from Jennifer Chang gives many kinds of readers many ways in."
--Stephanie Burt, American Poets

". . .[Some Say the Lark] exists in a state of constant movement. Offering bright red birds among cold and bare winter scenery, this collection resonates with longing."
--The Arkansas International

"Jennifer Chang's Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination--the familiar world rendered strange. In these poems a dark wisdom is at work reminding us that being in a state of longing is the nature of existential loneliness and that among our desires is a kind of self-destruction: 'we love loss as we love ourselves, / secretly. And too much.' The gift of these poems is in the act of defiance which engendered their creation: while the soul might begin in isolation, through language we can find our necessary adhesion to something larger, communal, full of radiant hope."
--Natasha Trethewey

"Jennifer Chang composes one astonishing phrase after another, edge to unexpected edge, a world that is both intimate and hallucinatory, where seemingly disparate images reveal their shared perimeter, their mutual wildness--and suddenly we're immersed in such exuberant sorrow. In Some Say the Lark, anything can erupt into fury, anything into tenderness. This book: what an agony, what a reconciliation."
--Patrick Rosal

About the Author

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, which was a finalist for the GlasgowShenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers and listed by Hyphen Magazine as a Top Five Book of Poetry for 2008. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.