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Today's poem is "Man With a Dog's Head"
from Our Age Of Anxiety

White Pine Press

Henry Israeli's poetry collections are Our Age of Anxiety (winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), god's breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books: 2016), Praying to the Black Cat (Del Sol: 2010), and New Messiahs (Four Way Books: 2002). He is also the translator of three books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books (www.saturnaliabooks.com), Associate Professor of English & Philosophy, and Director of the Drexel Writing Festival at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Other poems by Henry Israeli in Verse Daily:
July 30, 2010:   "Imaginary Garden: An Afterlife" "The day is jade, but smells a little yellow..."

Books by Henry Israeli:

Other poems on the web by Henry Israeli:
Two poems
Three poems
Seven poems
Two poems
"Blame the French"
"Book of Shoulds"
"Blue Orchid"
"So Many Machines"
"On Every Hand a Great Plain"

Henry Israeli's Website.

About Our Age Of Anxiety:

"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

"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



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