“Provocative” —The Washington Post

A vivid chronicle of friendship and loneliness amid the precarity of life in late capitalism, when every day is a fight for survival.

*A NEW JERSEY LIBRARY SYSTEM SELECTION FOR NATIONAL POETRY MONTH*

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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“Gritty, evocative…These affecting poems offer hard-earned insights about shame, loss, and hope.” —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

“Provocative…Tells the story of [a] complicated friendship while interrogating our attitudes about wealth and poverty, excess and waste, and ambition and deprivation in the richest country on Earth. ” —THE WASHINGTON POST

“Groundbreaking” —DIODE

“Larger-than-life” —THE SUN

“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

“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.” —THE COMMON

“Carlson-Wee’s formally varied poems, with their spare lines and plain-spoken voices, capture a young would-be hero’s quest….Front and center…is the poet’s ability to deliver understated, startling emotional truth….Poignant and hopeful…a tale well told.” —WEST BRANCH

“[An] extended parable of friendship…that resonates with the heart of humanity. Disease of Kings reveals our deepest secrets and failings with complex sympathy.” —LOS ANGELES REVIEW

“Questioning statements rake each page with an athletic sureness that, to its major credit, never succumbs to the…sentimental.” —HARVARD REVIEW

“Disease of Kings is a spare yet plumbing collection….Carlson-Wee’s is a poetry of frugality: it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the ornamentation of figurative language and rhyme and allusion, but folks, the man is on a budget. He is working within the constraints of economics & lyric, and he’s investing in story. He’s investing in observation. He’s investing in, to quote his poem ‘Where I’m At,’ the ‘only thing there is to say.’” —NASHVILLE 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.” —32 POEMS

“These slices of life feel real. These poems went down smooth. They left me wanting more.” —HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW

“Disease of Kings is a clear-eyed take on modern reality, with its colossal waste, its unbearable lonesomeness, its disorienting flux....Masterfully captures a naturalness of voice...both crystal clear and laden with implication....What a fine read, indeed.” —ECOTHEO REVIEW

“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

“[Disease of Kings has] a real-world, practical elegance [that] resonates with its own kind of music” —NPR, Dante’s Old South Radio

“Disease of Kings attain[s] deep emotional resonance through the smallest details….The terrain is vast, full of unexpected treasures.” —TUPELO QUARTERLY

“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 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

“Wee’s gifts…are apparent here. The poems read easily, propelling the reader through the book with a steady voice whose music is swift and consistent.” —BODY

“[Disease of Kings] tell[s] the stories of…a world touched by deprivations and suffering…but also by beauty and plenty and joy.” —THE RUMPUS

“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 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

“[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

“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

“Poems full of freedom and gratitude, rejoicing even in lack, and providing us with another vision of how to live successfully.” —OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters

“[Disease of Kings] pulls at the reader’s heartstrings as much as it does on their instinctual emphasis for a common humanity.” —ECOTHEO

“Disease of Kings is nothing short of a coup de maître” —PREPOSITION MAGAZINE

“Carlson-Wee leads his readers into the particular weather of a friendship conducted along the tenuous line between American dreams and harsh realities. He harnesses the spiritual lightning found in deposit bottles, desperate feasts and embodied promises.” —AARIK DANIELSEN

“[A] subtle, cinematic masterpiece.” —CAITLIN BUXBAUM

“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.’” —CHAPTER 16