Jennifer Chang: An Authentic Life

“In the Middle of My Life,” Jennifer Change writes:

I once loved a man
who’d force the weight of his body
into a felt-tip pen, scoring torn

I am not really sure what she means. It takes me half way through the collection to read something I understand. “What Is Truth” is a heartbreaking poem, in which she reveals:

The woman in the bed next to mine
was also a wife, also a suicide, and refused
to take off her headscarf.
Both of us had been emptied,
stomachs pumped, hazy,
self-hazed in the bleak hours
before dawn. She had more to say
than I did, more right to her grief,
though our charts read the same,
neither of us content,
neither white. Without my glasses,
the room a yellow blur,
her coal-dark eyes startling
as a reflection caught
in passing. Alone with her,
far from my life, we were
a calm pair, propped up
on white sheets stiffened by daily
bleaching, every touch sterilized,
unfeeling. Like me, she had taken pills:
Vicodin, Percocet, poisoned anapests
choking our throats. She had not chosen
her own life and so endeavored
to leave it the indifferent husband, the children, pitiless, pulling at her sleeves,
her hands, pant legs, and hems,

She writes a lot about her father as well. I have to revisit the poems to understand their relationship.