Our Age Of Anxiety

“Our Age of Anxiety radiates a dark equanimity, finality's ultimate grace. The poems' wisdom is quietly astonishing, shot through with surreal and measured threads of satire. Much is revealed here about our falling world and human illusion. Cities are re-absorbed back into nature's grand plan. The problems of suffering and of the dead and their eternal grip on us are sung of as these poems search for and find, among our beautiful ruins, fresh redemptions.”—Amy Gerstler

“Our Age of Anxiety is filled with an anxiety whose company is a true pleasure. These poems enact amazing transformations—everything in the world is capable of changing into everything else, and nothing is too lowly to astonish. A flea beetle attack proves quite alarming! There are also moments of startling surprise here, when Israeli reaches out of the poem to address the reader, to pull you even closer. In this book Eastern European dark playfulness and an American cinematic eye meet up in the middle of a nameless city that has way too many banks for things to turn out well.”—Matthew Rohrer

“When I read Our Age of Anxiety, I feel invited in and swept along. His precise, surreal imagery gives me the chills. Same for his diction, which is so sharp and exact it could cut glass. At times, I feel like I have fallen into a painting by Rene Magritte. A man with a dog’s head searches for a fashionable hat. A fox tries on a shirt and pants and pretends to be a man. A lion carries a human baby in its mouth. I admire how, in just a handful of poems, and without naming any politician, Israeli powerfully evokes the disbelief and terror many people feel at this moment in history, and this undercurrent resonates throughout the collection. In the title poem, he writes “I’ve felt myself entangled / in radio waves in this aftermath.” Yet after “the last glow worm / shuts off its little bulb” and I’ve finished reading, I feel hopeful--hopeful and grateful a voice like Henry Israeli’s exists.—Kathleen McGookey