Poetry Night: Anders Carlson-Wee

We invite you to join us for Poetry Night with Anders Carlson-Wee, as he returns to Content for the release of his new poetry collection DISEASE OF KINGS. Join us on Monday, October 16th at 7 p.m., either in-store or on Facebook Live.

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.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of DISEASE OF KINGS (W.W. Norton, 2023), THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents and lives in Los Angeles.