Genealogy

By Jennifer Chang Jennifer Chang

This stream took a shorter course—

a thread of water that makes oasis

out of mud, in pooling,

does not aspire to lake. To river, leave

the forest, the clamorous wild.

I cannot. Wherever I am,

I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic,

stock-still as the trees. Trickling

never floods, furrows its meager path

through the forest floor.

There will always be a root

too thirsty, moss that only swallows

and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying

from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort,

the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt

or the meekest pond,

I would absorb everything.

I would drown. Water makes song

of erratic forms, and I hear the living

push back branches, wander off trail.

Source: The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008)

Biography

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She is a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she is a PhD candidate.

Chang’s lyrical poems often explore the shifting boundaries between the outer world and the self. Chang’s debut poetry collection, The History of Anonymity (2008), was selected for the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for . . .

Continue reading this biography