Search results for ""Author Anders Carlson-Wee""

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. A range of strong-willed characters takes shape, amplified by a chorus of monologues from the strangers who shelter him and the family he’s left behind—each made manifest by the poet’s devoted ear and sensitive eye.

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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.

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