Our Age of Anxiety
978-1945680304
“When I read Our Age of Anxiety, I feel invited in and swept along. Israeli’s 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, Israeli powerfully evokes the disbelief and terror many people feel at this moment in history, and this undercurrent resonates throughout the collection. 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, judge
“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
BLAME THE FRENCH
1.
Whatever you do
the French did first.
Whatever you say
the French said first.
Whatever you wear
the French wore first.
You see the pattern?
There’s nothing in life
that the French did
not do first. Nothing.
Can you think of anything?
Wrong. The French
did it first. Say what?
The French already said that.
You saw something
original in a film once?
Then you never saw
Renoir or Cocteau.
You read something?
Zola, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
de Beauvoir, take your pick.
Food? Don’t even go
there, wise guy.
You had a dream
after which you awoke
amazed at the veracity
of your complicated mind?
Get over yourself.
The French dreamt it
long before you.
Everything you’ve done
in the bedroom—
I’ll simply say, the French,
and waste no time
humiliating you further.
Everything you ever
encounter or experience
in this short-long life
you may thank or blame
the French for,
take your pick.
2.
But, for god’s sake,
pity the French, will you?
For they have no one
to praise, no one to fault.
They are doomed to
the boredom of
self-containment.
When a Frenchman
looks in the mirror
he sees no reflection,
nothing whatsoever,
for there’s nothing
to reflect upon.
As the originator of all
he can only,
as Descartes said
more eloquently, be.
A Frenchwoman can
never experience
the joy of being told
she looks French,
for that is a vile
(or as the French
say, vil) redundancy,
and holds no logic
for the French mind.
It’s like kissing your
own ghost and falling
into an ethereal abyss
of self-referential absurdity,
which is, after all,
typically French.
Henry Israeli 