The Worried Well (Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize)

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.”

Anthony Immergluck is a poet and publishing professional with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from NYU-Paris. His work has been widely published in journals including Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly. Originally from the Chicago area, he now lives with his wife and pit bull in Madison, WI, where he works at W.W. Norton as the Midwest Social Science Specialist for the academic publishing branch.