Our Age of Anxiety

Henry Israeli’s Our Age of Anxiety reflects the discomfort of our present moment in history when the world as we’ve known it has seemingly come unhinged. Taking its title from W.H. Auden’s controversial book length meditation on his era, Our Age of Anxiety blends elements of the author’s personal life with a natural world that has been upended by existential fear and doubt. Mannequins dive from planes, dogs wear hats, snakes devour children, fathers disguise themselves as creatures that roam suburban backyards, cities are crumbling, and the dead return with guns buried in their skulls. These are just a few of the areas Israeli’s poems touch upon as they reach past the reality of our day to day existence and explore, with humor and horror, the emotional underpinnings of living life with a dreadful uncertainty.