The Anxiety Workbook

A thing I love about Christina Olson’s poems is the lightly off-kilter lens through which she examines the world, the way she invents and discovers beauty from unlikely sources. There are plenty of terrible things to worry about in The Anxiety Workbook, but also classic movies, reality television, wondrous flora and fauna, the Oregon Trail, and mastodon bones. Olson writes, ‘It’s not suffocation if it’s beautiful,’ so breathe. Breathe in this awesome book and all its disarming gorgeousness. These poems are heartachingly fresh.

In The Anxiety Workbook, Christina Olson shares the daily work of surviving our times, surviving childhood, surviving loved ones, surviving ourselves. This capacious collection considers all manner of flora and fauna, including mastodons, dogs, wisteria, and lungfish; friends and family show up, as well as fathers including the speaker’s and Thomas Jefferson. This book is at turns humorous and poignant; early in the collection in ‘What I Learned from the Ginkgo’ the impulse of ‘using humor as a shield’ is weighed. In these poems we’re shown the shield as they let their guard down as much as a poem can and that sharing of vulnerability cares for the reader as it attends to the world. Christina Olson’s The Anxiety Workbook is a book that will carry us through this moment of ours and hold us beyond it. I’m grateful for this book and you will be too.

The Anxiety Workbook is the most interesting book of poetry I have read all year. Brutal, funny, full of facts about mammoths, mastodons, gardening, and made-up words that are spelled and pronounced as if they were German, this is a stunning compendium of the kinds of truths about human anxiety that shouldn’t surprise us anymore, but they do, and the singularity with which they are articulated is what makes up the artistry of Christina Olson’s work. Olson is unrelenting, rigorously vulnerable, an elegant poet who recognizes the necessity of making sure the reader of her collection of poems is in on the very dark, poignant joke—this is an anxiety workbook, but as she writes in one of her poems, ‘it turns out that therapy doesn’t fix you / it just gives you the tools to cope with your brokenness.’ This book too won’t fix you, but it will give you the tools to recognize what a miracle it is to have someone see you the way she does.