Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
The Work Anxiety Poems
by Alan Catlin
Edited by Michele McDannold
Roadside Press
Dec 2025, US$15, 116 pages, ISBN: 979-8-9996256-2-5
Alan Catlin writes in “The Public Reading: a work anxiety poem”:
I felt like a Kafka character in search
of a story that has no end.
It’s a familiar feeling to which everybody can relate, a dream we’ve all had, running down endless, unfamiliar streets in search of some elusive, ill-defined destination. It’s almost a dictionary definition of “anxiety.”
The first three dozen and change poems in The Work Anxiety Poems deal with the “work” aspect: poems that focus on the bar, a setting familiar to readers of Alan Catlin’s work, from his professional career in the hospitality industry. Drunks, cops, killers, lost women, lost men (“Maybe he was just another cruel / joke by God,” he starts “Good Friday”). He’s seen them all. They’re the people you’ve come to expect inhabiting Catlin’s poems.
But combine these with the “Anxiety” poems in the second part, and you see what leads those characters to the bar in the first place, and why it’s never going to be an answer to their dilemma in any case. Or, more to the point, why any of us is able to get out of bed in the morning. “Ex Post Facto Work Anxiety Dream” starts out:
I wasn’t supposed to
have these dreams after
I retired but there I am,
at the bus stop, waiting
for the one that says,
“Express Albany”
but no buses come.
I’m already late and
beyond stressed about it.
Sound familiar? I know I’ve had those dreams, forces beyond one’s power in control of one’s fate. And they don’t go away! As he starts “Five Years After: a work anxiety poem,” the same damn dream keeps recurring:
Even on the five-year anniversary
of no longer working the bar job,
the nightmares of being there as
real and immediate as being there
ever was, feeling bound, frustrated,
blocked, hindered in every way imaginable…
Five years? Try five decades. “Work Anxiety Dream” spells this out:
Even though I am sleeping,
I dream I am awake, that
the term paper is due in a week,
finals as well, all of Byron to
read, Shelley, three novels,
learn German overnight…
Even as a septuagenarian I sometimes dream I am sitting naked in my elementary school class, as yet to be discovered by the teacher or my classmates. In poem after poem, Catlin spells it all out: “Night Walking: a work anxiety poem” (“All the addresses on / the buildings are the same”), “New Job: a work anxiety poem” (the title says it all), “Sleeper Awake: a work anxiety poem” (“So I’m getting dressed and / it begins to feel like the Dali dream / sequence in “Spellbound”), “Bleeding: a work anxiety dream” (“The end of those college days meant / a place like Vietnam”), “The Bus: a work anxiety dream” (“Down the center aisle / they come, banging their / cymbals and their tambourines”). In “May Day Dream Poem” he’s being driven around in an Uber in which “our guides are two Russians / who look disturbingly familiar. / Like Lev and Igor from the Mueller / Report fiasco.” And in “Abu Ghraib: a work anxiety dream” it’s the template for all anxiety dreams:
That one where you are
transported to one of those
torture chamber prisons in Iraq
where they apply hoods with
no eye slits and strap you into
stress positions and play
repetitive bass line music/noise…
But it’s the bar, the workplace, where the real anxiety takes hold like a bear trap around the ankle. “St. Patrick’s Day as Hell: a work anxiety dream” is not so much a dream as the memory of a bartender on one of those holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, that are not so much a celebration of anything as they are a license to get shitfaced:
After the early A.M. arrivals, the three-day bingers,
eyes like pin holes in a black canvas;
After the heart attack machine, flushed face turning
blue, a bite of corned beef on rye still
lodged in his throat;
After the ambulances go, the police cars, Black Maria
wagons…
The scene goes on, echoing Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” and the work anxiety poems in the bar go on. “Work Anxiety Poem: Hotter than Hell,” “Work Anxiety Dream: Stalker,” “Work Anxiety Dream: The Haunting,” “Day’s End: a work anxiety poem” all take place at work, as do “Work Anxiety Dream: No Exits,” “Snowbound: A Work Anxiety Dream,” and “The Grim Sweeper After: a work anxiety poem.” “War of the Worlds Work Anxiety Poem” (“I’m working the bar in this / long World War I trench”) puts an oddly cinematic stamp on the dream experience.
“Re-Education Camp: a work anxiety poem” may shift the whole anxiety vibe into a higher gear befitting the times we are living through:
We’ve been sent to the Elon
Musk re-education camp to
reconsider our life choices and
to reorder our priorities.
Think of those poor government folks in DOGE’s sights, the people at the Social Security Administration, USAID, FEMA, NOAA, the Department of Education and any number of agencies and departments deemed too “woke” by the Trump gang. Imagine the anxiety dreams those people are going to have for the rest of their lives. As Alan Catlin reminds us, not even retirement and a pension are going to spare them.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and just out, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.