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“Poems that will outlast us.” —MAGGIE SMITH

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

“Provocative” —THE WASHINGTON POST

“Groundbreaking” —DIODE

“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

“[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

“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 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

“[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

“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

“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

“Anders Carlson-Wee thumbs his way through the new Old West, a place as earthy and brutal as a Cormac McCarthy novel, and as metaphysical and complicated as David Lynch’s timber-lined Twin Peaks…[The Low Passions is] litter[ed] with lines just begging to be tattooed across someone’s breastbone…Carlson-Wee make[s] the vagabond life sound like the most beautiful and dreadful existence imaginable.” —ENTROPY MAGAZINE

“Carlson-Wee has a true gift for narrative. The poems carve arcs toward illumination” —RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF BOOKS

“Trenchantly observed and moving . . . The Low Passions evinces a faith . . . in the stolid fiber of a people subjected to slow violence.” —THE KENYON REVIEW

“Plain-spoken beauty” —SLICE MAGAZINE

“The poetry I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.” —LAURA KASISCHKE

“Restless and searching, taking readers through the truck cabs, living rooms, dumpsters, freight yards, and railways of America’s wide middle . . . a strong eye for fleshing out character in a few simple lines.” —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

“The Low Passions delivers much more than the sum of its parts. Its organizing principle is memory, memory as it actually operates, recursive, abstract, visceral and obsessive by turns. To read The Low Passions . . . is to inhabit a simulacrum of someone else’s mind.” —32 POEMS MAGAZINE

“What sets The Low Passions apart . . . is its astounding confidence, its palpable self-awareness . . . there is an impressive amount of invisible glue holding everything together into a well-made thing . . . There’s wonder and awe throughout these poems . . . and we’re left with much wisdom.” —WEST BRANCH

“Uncanny lyric aptitude” —THE SEWANEE REVIEW

“The poems Carlson-Wee writes to give voice to the often overlooked have the most impact . . . [He] creates a harrowing tribute.” —BOOKLIST

“Incandescent . . . The Low Passions rages with love and mercy . . . profoundly concerned with gratitude, atonement, and paternal pardon . . . we all may have met our match with the enduring star that is Anders Carlson-Wee . . . One of the most singularly original voices I’ve read.” —PAPERBACK PARIS

“Riveting . . . prophetic . . . touching . . . Carlson-Wee speaks from a place of humility and understanding.” —ENGLEWOOD REVIEW OF BOOKS

“Carlson-Wee makes everyday language a literary device of its own . . . an uncanny eye for life’s terror and beauty.” —ETHOS LITERARY JOURNAL

“Riveting and action-driven, showcasing a bold new voice” —THE ADROIT JOURNAL

“The most urgent, tightly-paced narratives I’ve read in recent memory . . . Each poem had my fingers gripping tightly to the (now) curled pages.”  —STORY SOUTH

“The Low Passions is an ode to America, the distances between place and people, the desire to quiet the self in order to better hear the world. Shaped through glimpses of a life in motion, these poems rattle along with energy and awe like the trains that fill these pages. If the work feels wild, there is also a feeling of tenderness as Anders Carlson-Wee reflects on childhood and brotherhood, what family means, and how a stranger can feel like family. The Low Passions reminds us to go out each day in wonder ready for the unknown to call to us.” —Dorianne Laux, Author of ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG

 “‘If you don’t live it,’ Charlie Parker said of his own music, ‘it won’t come out of your horn.’ Anders Carlson-Wee is a balladeer who has certainly lived his song. The Low Passions makes a Walden Pond of the railyard and cornucopias of every dumpster behind a strip mall. It paints portraits akin to those of James Agee, but to be captivated by them solely is to risk overlooking the urgency of experience in this debut collection. As terror drives the sublime and duende keeps one cold foot in the grave, these poems are as chilling as they are electrifying. Yet the perils of life off the grid are relieved by the light of inexplicable kindnesses discovered along the way. Through it all is the ever-loving American landscape, divine and brutal as Dillard’s Tinker Creek.” —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author of DIGEST

 “‘Our fresh buzzcuts / lumpy with goose eggs. It’s easy to forget / we were trying to kill each other.’ So writes the remarkable new poet, Anders Carlson-Wee, in The Low Passions. I first encountered his poems at the Sewanee Writers Conference three years ago. Ah, I thought, a poet of the contemporary Midwest who actually knows it. I was amazed by the precision and authenticity of this post-Nick Adams voice that is so utterly free of regional stereotype, false colors, and the standard rural and small-town themes and subject-matter. Anders inhabited a world within a world of train yards, sibling (and other) violence, the dangers of the road, and a crazy cousin whose monologues sound awfully close to wisdom. Rather than repeating the cheap tunes of nostalgia, America would do better to read Carlson-Wee and a poetry that reassumes its ancient task of truth-telling.” —B.H. Fairchild, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Author of THE BLUE BUICK

“The broken beauty of a corrupted Arcadia. Carlson-Wee echoes the reminders that what we once knew as charming, rural, and small-town America has been devastated by economic destitution, systematic cultural decay, and drug abuse . . . there is something decidedly American in Carlson-Wee’s bald and assertive lines” —NATIONAL REVIEW

“Sorrowful, yearning for a space the world hasn’t made” —WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“Moving and all-too-human . . . Carlson-Wee achieves a more honest version of Keats’s Negative Capability”  —RAIN TAXI REVIEW

“Transformative . . . Carlson-Wee crafts images that are raw, precise, and immediate, his language both spare and visceral”  —SLICE MAGAZINE

“The evoking of place and sensation is so very precise, while the negotiation of the bonds of relationship remains suggestively mysterious” —AGNI

“There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family” —New Books Network

“Dramatic and volatile, filled with an explosive and masculine energy. And yet it’s the subtle but ever-surfacing lyricism radiating out from stunning understatements coupled with precise and nuanced detail that makes these poems unforgettable. Dynamite is a collection that first affects the reader strongly and swiftly—and then achingly and hauntingly over time.” —JENNIFER GROTZ

“So attuned to the music and texture of syllables, the sound-sculptures of syntax, and the complex under-meanings of metaphor, that shaping phrases and sentences to enact (rather than merely express) their own meanings is second nature to him. Anders Carlson-Wee makes the rugged physical and emotional world of the upper plains our world.” —B.H. FAIRCHILD

“Anders Carlson-Wee’s Dynamite will make you wish you knew the birdcall for this book’s kind of danger—the danger of beauty, the danger of change.” —TRACI BRIMHALL

“I love how hard this book looks at the physical world, and how that looking turns into music.” —ROSS GAY

“These brothers speak to one another in a private language made lyric, made public, knowing no matter who they meet along the way, no one will ever know them as intimately as they know one another.  A hauntingly beautiful and unusual debut collection.” —DORIANNE LAUX

“Invites us into a dream America is having about itself, where the voices are both the road and the kicked-up gravel dust, memory and the occasion for memory, the flame and its shadow. An entrancing investigation of place and self and other, a spell one never wants broken.” —MICHAEL McGRIFF

“This is a wholly unique and powerful collection of poems. The sense of purpose puts one in mind of Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” but the darker need to search for meaning in the American plains and points farther west—a vastness forlorn and almost unknowable—belongs to the shared vision of these two brother-poets. Their journeys through our national ambiguity discover a flicker in our roots, a spark popping from obscurity that rises into the heavens.” —MAURICE MANNING