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National Poetry Month: Anders Carlson-Wee

About Blog Post Apr 11, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff
National Poetry Month: Anders Carlson-Wee   Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Our National Poetry Month poet for today is Anders Carlson-Wee. Carlson-Wee's debut collection, "The Low Passions," was published in 2019 by Norton. From the publisher's description: "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." Poet Gregory Pardlo said it was a collection of "(p)oems as chilling as they are electrifying." Carlson-Wee followed this up with 2023's "Disease of Kings,” also published by Norton. The publisher describes it as a "vivid chronicle of friendship and loneliness amid the precarity of life in late capitalism, when every day is a fight for survival." In his review of the collection, poet Patrick Phillips said "'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." You can link to a number of Carlson-Wee's poems on the author's website. Read a few, then check out "The Low Passions" and "Disease of Kings" today!
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