Disease of Kings: Poems

by Anders Carlson-Wee

Overview

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

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324105114
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings, 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, Harvard Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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