The Worried Well and Exploding Head: Poetry with Anthony Immergluck and Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Name: The Worried Well and Exploding Head: Poetry with Anthony Immergluck and Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Start: 2025-04-10T18:00:00-05:00
Location: 2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53704

Schedule

Thu, 10 Apr, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53704 | Madison, WI

Unfortunately CD Eskilson is no longer able to read on April 10th, so A Room of One's Own is excited to welcome local poets Anthony Immergluck and Cynthia Marie Hoffman for a reading, in celebration of Immergluck's newly released book of poems The Worried Well.
This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.
About the books
The Worried Well: Poems
The Worried Well 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.”
Exploding Head
Exploding Head is an unsettling, image-rich memoir-in-prose-poems chronicling a lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which began in childhood and continues through the present day, challenging the poet's relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world.
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. In his free time, Immergluck is a passionate traveler and hiker. He’s also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter when no one is watching. 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.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, an OCD memoir in prose poems. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Essays have appeared in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems have appeared in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.