Overview

In poems bursting with narrative power, Disease of Kings explores the tender yet volatile friendship between two young scammers living off the fat of society. Here are stories of an odd couple who scrounge, con, hustle, and steal, alternately proud of their ability to fabricate a life at the margins and ashamed of their own laziness and greed. Rich with a specificity of voices, these poems locate themselves in a midwestern city at once gritty with reality and achingly anonymous. Here, the central speaker and his best—only—friend, North, come together and apart, nursing a sense of freedom that is fraught with codependence and isolation. With plainspoken language and tremendous tonal range, Anders Carlson-Wee leads us into the heart of one friendship’s uneasy domesticity—a purgatory where, in this poet’s vision, it is possible for loss to give way to hope, lack to fulfillment, shame to gratitude.

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9781324105114

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Reviews

""Disease of Kings transforms starkness into hope."" -- Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke ""[Anders Carlson-Wee’s] terrain is vast, full of unexpected treasures and…worthy subjects."" -- Ann Fisher-Wirth - Tupelo Review ""These affecting poems offer hard-earned insights about shame, loss, and hope."" -- Publishers Weekly ""Disease of Kings is a harrowing dive into late-empire America, with its underworld of scroungers and squirrelers, dumpster-chefs and honest thieves, who have turned their backs on the gluttony of the Anthropocene. Again and again, these beautiful poems ‘sing what we can’t say,’ and dare to imagine a new life, fashioned from the wreckage of this one."" -- Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine ""Anders Carlson-Wee’s Midwest is not the Midwest of Bly or Wright, with their farms and coal towns, but a contemporary portrait set in late capitalism. There are dumpsters to dive behind the Whole Foods; Cannondale bikes to steal on campus. The young men in this book seem to struggle to craft selves, hatching plan after plan to get a little more, do a little better, maintain the freedom they’ve bought, borrowed, or stolen. At the heart of Disease of Kings is male friendship, which toggles between intimate and distant, tender and tough. As Carlson-Wee writes, ‘Isn’t that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you / can never be?’"" -- Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod ""Anders Carlson-Wee travels in and out of utter-noir midnight to lightening-dawn hues with such aplomb, his poems seem effortless. Yet his rigor of focus crosses borders of every kind. He manages a virtuoso’s dance through the book’s many astonishments, making elegance feel easy, which it is not. Expect acclaim."" -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels ""[An] extended parable of friendship.… [R]esonates with the heart of humanity. Disease of Kings reveals our deepest secrets and failings with complex sympathy."" -- Dustin Pickering - Los Angeles Review ""Groundbreaking."" -- Alexis Sears - Diode Poetry Journal ""Carlson-Wee writes exquisitely about loneliness.… Disease of Kings is both a thoughtful meditation on the cost of going it alone and an emotionally devastating treatise on the need for human touch and connection."" -- Rain Taxi Review of Books ""Disease of Kings showcases a mastery of tone and voice, an uncanny ability to talk to you (reader) like a friend and confidant, while telling you the hardest truths—truths that might actually change your life, truths the world doesn’t necessarily want you to know. These poems are urgent without being demanding, confessional without being sensational, and indirectly lead us to reconsider the nuances of relationships, how our lives are structured, and ultimately the big questions of what matters most."" -- Joy Baglio - Common ""[Disease of Kings] tell[s] the stories of…a world touched by deprivations and suffering…but also by beauty and plenty and joy."" -- Rumpus ""Questioning statements rake each page with an athletic sureness that, to its major credit, never succumbs to the…sentimental."" -- Harvard Review ""Carlson-Wee’s skill and versatility [allows] narratives and meditations and monologues and…lyrics [to] intermingle, not as they do in a sculpted narrative but as they do in a consciousness. The poems are by turns candid, self-justifying, lonely, angry, cocky, embarrassed and, distinguished from embarrassed, ashamed. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an ordinary, unromantic sense of shame so well rendered.)…The overwhelming emotion of the book…is marrow-echoing loneliness, and here Carlson-Wee’s ability to meld intensity and understatement shines."" -- Susan Blackwell Ramsey - 32 Poems ""These slices of life feel real. These poems went down smooth. They left me wanting more."" -- Heavy Feather Review ""[Disease of Kings has] a real-world, practical elegance [that] resonates with its own kind of music."" -- NPR, Dante’s Old South Radio ""[Carlson-Wee’s] poems read easily, propelling the reader through the book with a steady voice whose music is swift and consistent."" -- Body ""I love Carlson-Wee’s ability to handle complex subject matter with a clarity of language and form that allow the third-dimensionality of this book to shine through.… Carlson-Wee is able to carry a speaker’s voice with such precision."" -- Washington Review of Books ""[Disease of Kings] is loaded with…fascinating characters.… [An] impressive collection of poetry with its sustaining message of faith and hope in the human spirit."" -- Jack Grady - Diode Poetry Journal ""[Disease of Kings] is so cohesively solid."" -- Taylor Brorby - North American Review ""Poems full of freedom and gratitude, rejoicing even in lack, and providing us with another vision of how to live successfully."" -- Rachel Custer - Open: Journal of Arts & Letters ""Disease of Kings is nothing short of a coup de maître."" -- Preposition ""The searching [in Disease of Kings] is more spiritual than physical, the restlessness more intimate than expansive. In the narrative that drives much of the collection, the speaker and his friend North scrabble to live off the fat of the land, which in the 21st century U.S. means taking advantage of the endless waste of a consumer economy. They dumpster dive for food and raise cash by holding fake moving sales with items they’ve scavenged. Other characters—odd, sad, sometimes generous—pop up in the poems, their fleeting presence a kind of counterpoint to the deep relationship with North. The speaker, ultimately left on his own, remains adrift in solitude he can neither give up nor settle into comfortably: ‘The longer I’m alone / the smaller a gesture could be // and still console / or rattle me. Strange to need // so little, but to need it / so badly.’"" -- Maria Browning - Chapter 16

Anders Carlson-Wee travels in and out of utter-noir midnight to lightening-dawn hues with such aplomb, his poems seem effortless. Yet his rigor of focus crosses borders of every kind. He manages a virtuoso's dance through the book's many astonishments, making elegance feel easy, which it is not. Expect acclaim.--Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels The poems in Disease of Kings are as sophisticated as they are innovative, the myriad voices and perspectives unsettling us with their hard-earned intimacy. And here, intimacy can be as complicated as an eviction notice--the thin veneer of propriety torn just enough to see the rusted and unbuckled self. These poems exemplify the ways American poverty and the subsequent hustles to survive often transfer from one family to another, from one generation to the next. They remind us of how place decides who we are, no matter how much we want to argue. Disease of Kings transforms starkness into hope, even as the poet continues searching for something more, the way a musician hunts for that final, immaculate melody.--Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World Disease of Kings is a harrowing dive into late-empire America, with its underworld of scroungers and squirrelers, dumpster-chefs and honest thieves, who have turned their backs on the gluttony of the Anthropocene. Again and again, these beautiful poems 'sing what we can't say, ' and dare to imagine a new life, fashioned from the wreckage of this one.--Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine Anders Carlson-Wee's Midwest is not the Midwest of Bly or Wright, with their farms and coal towns, but a contemporary portrait set in late capitalism. There are dumpsters to dive behind the Whole Foods; Cannondale bikes to steal on campus. The young men in this book seem to struggle to craft selves, hatching plan after plan to get a little more, do a little better, maintain the freedom they've bought, borrowed, or stolen. At the heart of Disease of Kings is male friendship, which toggles between intimate and distant, tender and tough. As Carlson-Wee writes, 'Isn't that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you / can never be?'--Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod

Author Information

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

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