The Low Passions: Poems

by Anders Carlson-Wee

Overview

In a “trenchantly observed and moving debut” (John James, Kenyon Review), Anders Carlson-Wee mines nourishment and holiness from the darkest of our human origins.

Explosive and incantatory, The Low Passions traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter. Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652390
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	295 KB

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.

Table of Contents

Riding the Owl's Eye 1

County 19 3

Dynamite 5

Finding Josh 7

Great Plains Food Bank 8

Leaving Fargo 9

Birdcalls 12

Living 14

Icefisher 16

McDonald's 17

Primer 19

The Muscles in Their Throats 21

Lodestar 23

Gathering Firewood on Tinpan 24

Cousin Josh on Doomsday 25

Asking for Work at Flathead Bible 27

Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Treehouse 29

To the Rail Cop at Rathdrum 31

Earshot 33

Flood of '97 34

The Raft 36

Cousin Josh on Family 37

Old Church 39

Moorcroft 40

Living with the Accident 41

Fire 43

Polaroid 44

Lillian 45

Short Bed 47

Between Boulders 49

Cousin Josh Goes Off on Food Stamps 50

Clausen's Dog 53

Checking for Ticks 55

Lyle Clears My Throat 56

Pride 59

News 60

St. Mary's Memorial 61

Cousin Josh on Lighthouse Mission 62

Soft Hunting 64

The Mark 66

Northern Corn 68

Cutting for Sign 70

Butte 71

Cousin Josh on His Liver 72

Affording the Funeral 74

Shoalwater 75

Ms. Range Wants to See Me in It 77

Taken In 78

The Low Passions 79

Years Later, I Go Back to Thank You 81

After Fighting 83

To My Cousin Josh with Nothing 84

Listening to a Rail in Mandan 86

Notes 89

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

"Carlson-Wee has a true gift for narrative. The poems carve arcs toward illumination."

Rain Taxi Review - Todd Davis

"The poems Carlson-Wee writes to give voice to the often overlooked have the most impact.… [He] creates a harrowing tribute to the people he met."

Booklist

"Incandescent.… We all may have met our match with the enduring star that is Anders Carlson-Wee."

Paperback Paris - Paris Close

"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

"'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

"What sets The Low Passions apart… is its astounding confidence, its palpable self-awareness.… There’s wonder and awe throughout these poems."

West Branch - Corey Van Landingham

"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."

32poems - Susan Blackwell Ramsey

"'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

"Carlson-Wee makes everyday language a literary device of its own.… [He has] an uncanny eye for life’s terror and beauty."

Ethos Literary Journal - Dustin Pickering