ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Anxiety Workbook is a full-length manuscript that explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish—The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics and much more in poems ranging from the hyper-narrative to the highly lyrical, rich in voice and description.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christina Olson is the author of Terminal Human Velocity and The Last Mastodon, which won the Rattle 2019 Chapbook Contest. Other work appears in the Atlantic, the Missouri Review, the Nation, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University and tweets about coneys and mastodons as @olsonquest. Her website is www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com.

REVIEWS

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 Gingko” 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, this be the verse I’ll continue to be grateful for and you will too.--Sean Hill

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.—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

“Keats tells us that ‘poetry should surprise by a fine excess,’ which is to say that Keats might be a little jealous of Christina Olson’s The Anxiety Workbook. Her work always surprises, either by way of humor or confession or observation or reflection or lyricism—sometimes all in the same poem. Few poets could make the Venn diagram of personal anxiety, a deep interest in mastodons, COVID pandemic anxiety, adulting, body image concerns, and Caddyshack feel inevitable, but by some miracle, Olson is able to achieve the nearly impossible. Her voice is a mixture of knowing and not-knowing, humor and grave seriousness. It feels smart and timely. This is a fantastic book.” —Dean Rader, author of The World is a Text

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) Screening Tool

1.

Intro to Therapy

Catalogue of Damages

Among the Bones

Dead Girl

Jury Selection

What I Learned from the Wisteria

After the Tragedy

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2010]

Neither Time Nor Grief is a Flat Circle

Heavy Weather Moves Through

What I Learned from the Gingko

Did You Take Something

2.

Ode to Never Remembering the Outcomes of Top Chef, with a Line from an Old Ani Difranco Song

Someday I’ll Love Christina Olson

Me, Myself, Good [Self-Portrait]

Another Theory on Language

Jeans! Jeans! Jeans!

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2011]

What I Learned from the Mastodon

What I Learned from the Remains of Xena, A 12-Foot Mammoth

Intermediate Therapy

As an Oregon Trail Millennial, I Actually Prefer Phone Calls

Something Like Laughter, Something Like Rage

What I Learned from the Gympie Gympie Plant

3.

What I Learned from the Velvet Ant

Poem with Teeth and Ants

Reptile House

The User’s Guide to Being Buried Alive

Urban Legends

The Thing You Fear Is Not the Thing That Kills You

What I Learned from the Copperhead

Fig, Wasp

Oregon Trail

They Cut Down the Tree in Front of Our Minnesota Place

4.

Surprise! Fear!

Anxiety Open House

Something Like Apology

Anxiety Summer

Anxiety Snow Day

Anxiety Garden

Anxiety Lake

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2019]

5.

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2011]

What I Learned from the Pregnancy I Terminated

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2017]

20/20

What I Learned from the West African Lungfish

Not the Discarding but the Cleaving

[...]

I Am Accidentally Prescribed Speed During the Pandemic

During the Pandemic, I Watch Caddyshack Again & Again

Self-Portrait As Anxiety-Watching Gardeners’ World with Monty Don

Covocabulary

What I Learned from the Goblin Shark

Write Your Trauma: A Workbook Exercise [2021]

Notes

Acknowledgments

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