The Worried Well

"The poems in The Worried Well are beautifully built, rigged with wonder and oomph. I never knew what to expect on each page—the poems ripple with deadpan humor, quicksilver thinking, shrewd leaps, and cinematic excitements. Language, here, is malleable and splendid. Subjects are wide-ranging: a green couch, death, matryoshka dolls, bus stops, money, and Narcissus at a pharmacy. Imagination, here, is splendid and malleable. These poems renew my faith in poetry, in its ability to infuse the familiar with new sensations."—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

"The poems in The Worried Well are magical in their notions and totally everyday in their locations, while throughout the imagination is going full-bore with material that in lesser hands could be maudlin. Illness, doubts, crying on the red eye—so much of what Immergluck shows us is our own everyday lives, but through a twisting kaleidoscope where the body is a world and you spend too much time in the hospital and where watching the Fellowship of the Ring with grandpa near the end of his life is simultaneously the funniest and saddest thing you could ever do. These are great poems written in a panoply of voices you don’t expect, but they always seem just right. I marveled, and laughed aloud, at these poems. —Matthew Rohrer, author of The Sky Contains the Plans

"In The Worried Well, anxiety takes the form of a dybbuk, the malevolent spirit from Jewish mythology who possesses and torments the living. But that spirit doesn’t stop at anxiety. It surfaces again and again throughout these finely wrought yet agitated poems, arising here in chronic illness and debt, there in fascists and shame, in pride, in a grandfather’s death. The world of Anthony Immergluck’s poems, no matter how rooted in significant pain and chaos, is a scrutinized world—and scrutiny requires distance. That distance comes across in biting humor, keen self-awareness, allusions ranging from the Old Testament to E.T., and the depth of clarity that arises from art’s necessary curations. Only from that perspective could we get such a fine image as 'the sun that sucks the wet from figs,' or one of my new favorite metaphors: 'Debt is a splintering pillory. / A lifetime of little deaths.' And only after all this distance could a speaker ultimately proclaim, 'When your hot breath finds my chest / […] it feels so much like stealing.'"—Corey Van Landingham author of Reader, I