SOME SAY THE LARK, BY JENNIFER CHANG
Jennifer Chang’s second book, Some Say the Lark, exists in a state of constant movement. Chang expertly guides the reader through streets, forests, trains, bare fields; always searching, writing against loneliness. It is through this restlessness that Chang finds connection: to the natural world, to the city, to family members and loved ones, to history. Surprising and intimate, by turns both tender and fierce, this book offers readers a glimpse into the inner turmoil of navigating life after loss.
These lyric poems are spare and tender, invoking familiar worlds with evocative strangeness. Chang’s natural landscapes—rendered with stark imagery—create the emotional landscape, a state of being in which the tendency is to note absences (“No more birds,” she says, “trace the coast”) while simultaneously solving for ways to fill them: “In winter / you have to know the bark to know the tree, / you have to look hard and not doubt / the spine and bole.” The resiliency and faith Chang strives for makes these poems important in a world too often resigned to despair.
This collection offers poetry as a pathway toward hope and forgiveness, a way of communing with something greater, asking, “What does it even mean to write a poem?” and answering, “It means today / I’m correcting my mistakes. / It means I don’t want to be lonely.” Offering bright red birds among cold and bare winter scenery, this collection resonates with longing.
