The Worried Well (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781637681039)

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the
winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection
that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.

Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor
and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at
precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The
Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted
with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?

The
"worried well" is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to
describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for
testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that
don't manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by
writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.

Despite the profound
subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor,
grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected
ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of
Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and
surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new
and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, "I don't / know
why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give /
the worry a name and then / to call it again and again."