Anders Carlson-Wee

Biography

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of the forthcoming Disease of Kings (Norton, 2023). He is also the author of The Low Passions (Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite (Bull City, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

See Work

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

Lou

By Anders Carlson-Wee

You don’t start at zero. You start way below zero.

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

Contact

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Be careful—I’m filled with glass.

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

Eviction Day

By Anders Carlson-Wee

After curbing what hasn’t sold

I sit across the street and spy on people

taking what this morning was mine.

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

Food Stamps Interview

By Anders Carlson-Wee

I don’t lie, but I try to make myself sound worse off than I am.

POETRY / Fall 2021

B&B

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Before North took a seasonal job / fishing for kings in Alaska / I’d never admitted to myself / that he was my only friend.

POETRY / Fall 2018

Pride

By Anders Carlson-Wee

After pulling a score from the dumpster 
behind Krogers I stroll through 
sliding doors with egg-caked hands. 
The greeter greets me as I pass. I scan 
the aisles like a surgeon studying the mint

POETRY / Fall 2018

The Mattress

By Anders Carlson-Wee

No car to drive to the dump and too embarrassed 
to borrow one, you scrape the black mold 
off the underside as best you can, muscle it 
onto your shoulder. Spores multiplied to the size 

POETRY / Fall 2018

Cleaning

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Sorting through the chest’s junk, I happened
on this picture of him, a stranger I lived with 
month-to-month while I looked for something