Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

"Anders Carlson-Wee’s Midwest is not the Midwest of Bly or Wright, with their farms and coal towns, but a contemporary portrait set in late capitalism. There are dumpsters to dive behind the Whole Foods; Cannondale bikes to steal on campus. The young men in this book seem to struggle to craft selves, hatching plan after plan to get a little more, do a little better, maintain the freedom they’ve bought, borrowed, or stolen. At the heart of Disease of Kings is male friendship, which toggles between intimate and distant, tender and tough. As Carlson-Wee writes, ‘Isn’t that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you / can never be?’"

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

"Anders Carlson-Wee’s Midwest is not the Midwest of Bly or Wright, with their farms and coal towns, but a contemporary portrait set in late capitalism. There are dumpsters to dive behind the Whole Foods; Cannondale bikes to steal on campus. The young men in this book seem to struggle to craft selves, hatching plan after plan to get a little more, do a little better, maintain the freedom they’ve bought, borrowed, or stolen. At the heart of Disease of Kings is male friendship, which toggles between intimate and distant, tender and tough. As Carlson-Wee writes, ‘Isn’t that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you / can never be?’"

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

"Anders Carlson-Wee’s Midwest is not the Midwest of Bly or Wright, with their farms and coal towns, but a contemporary portrait set in late capitalism. There are dumpsters to dive behind the Whole Foods; Cannondale bikes to steal on campus. The young men in this book seem to struggle to craft selves, hatching plan after plan to get a little more, do a little better, maintain the freedom they’ve bought, borrowed, or stolen. At the heart of Disease of Kings is male friendship, which toggles between intimate and distant, tender and tough. As Carlson-Wee writes, ‘Isn’t that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you / can never be?’"