I had hoped to place this in a literary magazine, but since the book has been out for six months now, I figure I might as well post it here if I want anyone to read it (and to kick off National Poetry Month!).
This was my last poetry annotation last term, and a real high note to end on as I transitioned into screenwriting.
A couple more things before we dive in:
I first met Anders on a Poetry Society of New Hampshire Zoom reading hosted by Jimmy Pappas, and I had the absolute pleasure of meeting him at the 2024 Associate of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in Kansas City a couple months ago. He’s a lovely and fascinating human being who has been interviewed and published widely, so definitely give him a Google if you haven’t already (or just scroll to the bottom of this post for some highlights).
Even if you’re not much of a poetry reader, Anders has a way of writing that I find incredibly relatable, accessible, and engaging, and if you like stories, I bet you will too.
Here’s what I have to say about his latest book:
Storytelling and Structure in Disease of Kings
With Disease of Kings (W.W. Norton, 2023), Anders Carlson-Wee has truly come into his own as a storyteller, detailing the lives of a speaker based on himself and his friend North in poignant and amusing detail. While his first full-length, The Low Passions, also features colorful characters and exceptional storytelling, his second narrows the focus and takes on a more cinematic quality as it explores the speaker’s philosophical and moral development. Considering poetic forms as lenses, readers can view Carlson-Wee’s prose and persona poems as directorial choices in a filmic collection that positively pushes the boundaries of narrative poetry.
At first glance, it might appear that the character sketches in Disease of Kings are set off by their form, such as the prose poems “Cora” and “Andrew,” but then there’s the lineated “Lou,” “Barb,” and “Oscar.” The difference, Carlson-Wee said in a Zoom interview with Joy Baglio of Pioneer Valley Writers, is perspective: While the former poems are more like “establishing shots” of “domestic scenes” experienced from the speaker’s point of view, the latter are first-person persona poems of characters that add humor, increase tension, and further illuminate his lifestyle as a dumpster-diving con artist.
In “Cora,” the first poem in Section I, for example, the opening shot shows rats: “They come at night and scratch in the kitchen, the pantry, looking for a way in” (Carlson-Wee 7). Then the reader is introduced to North, and the fundamental differences between him and the speaker become clear in just a few lines of dialogue: “Leave them alone, North says, but I keep jamming steel wool into cracks” (7). When the speaker comes home with a cat and the namesake of this poem, the natures of the characters are further elucidated (and contrasted): “North sees how it is and gives me the silent treatment, but he loves Cora” (7). The scene comes full circle and closes with an almost graphic description of the cat destroying a rat; Cora is batting half of the dying creature across the living room floor, when North and the speaker’s perspectives clash: “Leave it, North says when I get my knife and start forward. It’s natural. All this is natural” (8). The dissonance in these “lines” is striking—while there may be a perceived “natural order” in a cat killing a rat, there’s something disturbing about her playing with it, and in this moment of the poem, a disconnect between the violence that North finds acceptable and the violence that the speaker finds acceptable. It may not be clear to the reader at this point in the collection, but already the irreconcilable differences between and inevitable separation of these two main characters is being set up: Where North seeks order over mercy, the speaker seeks protection of his goods as well as the innocence of those around him. The speaker doesn’t want his possessions to be destroyed by the rat or the cat, but he also wants to shield North (and himself) from this display, this gruesome “reality.”
In the following section, the reader learns just how far the speaker will go to maintain his lifestyle. In “B&B,” the speaker describes how he opens his home to the public and serves “dumpstered” fare to tourists while North is away on a commercial fishing job in Alaska, in order to pay their rent (25). At five pages, this is the longest poem in the collection, and while it’s a fantastic piece in its own right, it also serves as exposition for “Barb” a few pages later. Barb is the health inspector, the mere presence of whom immediately builds tension in our protagonist’s story, but soon lessens it with statements like “I don’t work / B&Bs” and “it’s scheduled mostly: / they know I’m coming and I know they hide / what they don’t want me to find” (34). This relaxes the reader and the speaker, even emboldens him, it appears, when he almost tells the truth: “Where’d you find this bacon?” Barb asks, then says, “You’re kidding. / It’s not at all the way you’d think it would be” (34). Then the conversation moves on, leaving the reader to wonder—did he tell her? Knowing the character by this point, it’s more likely he lied, but not without some shred of shame. When Barb says “The human factor is the biggest bitch” (35), there’s a sense that this sentiment is echoed in the protagonist’s thoughts as well. The son of pastors and descendent of missionaries, Carlson-Wee has admitted how Christian morality and a (mostly) healthy sense of guilt has affected him throughout his life, and knowing this can help the reader see deeper meanings in his self-described “porous” poems.
Like many people with a Christian upbringing, religion also informed Carlson-Wee’s sensitivity to betrayal, as evidenced in Section III’s prose piece, “Andrew.” In this poem, the reader and the protagonist discover North’s real name, while learning how the characters have conned multiple state governments into giving them food stamps—and not just to feed themselves, but to acquire goods to sell on the street (51). Each young man is registered in two states, but the names on North’s registrations are different. While they’ve obviously been running this con for a while, and been friends (co-conspirators?) for even longer, the protagonist only discovers North’s true (legal) identity in a casual conversation on their way to find “a buyer:” “North says … my real name, it’s not North, it’s Andrew. I stop walking. I turn to face him. You’re kidding, I say. Andrew shakes his head” (51). There’s so much understated emotion and personality in those four short sentences, those actions—to North, it’s an aside, a trivial matter, not worth words, while for the protagonist, it literally stops him short, incredulous. What other secrets have been kept?
But just as a theatrical trailer can’t contain all the nuance of a quality, feature-length film, so are these poems just a few scenes in a subtle, cinematic masterpiece. Anders Carlson-Wee’s Disease of Kings is a book to be savored, to be read again and again, and not to be missed.
Work Cited
- Carlson-Wee, Anders. Disease of Kings. W.W. Norton, 2023.
Further Reading
- Lay It Bare: Joy Baglio Interviews Anders Carlson-Wee
- Links to individual published poems by Anders Carlson-Wee (his website)
- “Fifteen Years of Free Time: How I became a poet by learning how to live without money” (The Adroit Journal)
- “Riding the Highline,” a short film by brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 