Disease of Kings by Anders Carlson-Wee. Norton, 2023. 112 pp. $26.95 (hardback)

How often do you enjoy the second book of a new poet as thoroughly as their first? How much more often do you find that a desire to demonstrate “growth” has eliminated two thirds of what you admired, or that the poet has fallen off the horse on the other side by publishing in pink what they’d previously produced in blue? Anders Carlson-Wee’s The Low Passions was remarkable for fresh material so skillfully handled that recognizing the nearly-invisible craft came as a bonus treat. Now Norton has released Disease of Kings, and instead of renouncing his strengths or worse, cranking out blurred copies, Carlson-Wee has taken what was good, turned it in the light and added something we might not have realized was missing—himself.

This may seem an odd assertion, since in both books a young man with very little money struggles to find ways to survive and showcases the people he encounters. Granted, Disease of Kings focuses on a single urban year, exchanging the on-the-road encounters of The Low Passions for an urban landscape, but is there really a substantial difference?

There is. The compassionate but detached persona is gone, replaced by the unreliable narrator we all are to ourselves. This persona may lay out a credo in “Ambition,” asserting an intention “to get by on found food, / castoff clothes, scams / and hustles and handouts” hoping “To wonder about judgment / less than about stealing / the time it takes to wonder.” But in other contexts he sounds less absolute—”[my mother] was good / at justifying my lifestyle, calling it / stewardship of the Earth… As if she didn’t know / how cheap I was, how greedily / I clung to each free hour.” Add a friend, subtract a friend and reality shifts—and Disease of Kings is nothing if not a tally of subtracted people.

What hasn’t changed is Carlson-Wee’s skill and versatility, so narratives and meditations and monologues and lyrics intermingle, not as they do in a sculpted narrative but as they do in a consciousness. The poems are by turns candid, self-justifying, lonely, angry, cocky, embarrassed and, distinguished from embarrassed, ashamed. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an ordinary, unromantic sense of shame so well rendered.)

I confess that I was startled and impressed by Carlson-Wee’s willingness to confront those less glamorous emotions. Poems about love, loneliness, sorrow are common, but acknowledging shame is rarer, and expands what might have been just another self-justifying automythology. It may seem merely a peculiar compunction when, running a fake Moving Sale with his friend North, he says “…but my secret was / that if I’d been alone I would have died / of shame.” But “Where I’m At,” one of the lynchpins of the collection, is a litany of moments where he has been an object of charity—a fifty dollar gift card delivered by the waitress, fictive thrift-store discounts, and worst, the woman with a newborn strapped to her chest who finds him mining a Walmart dumpster, passes him a wad of twenties saying “I’ve been where you’re at” and hurries off. These intrusions destabilize and complicate the story he’s telling himself.

The overwhelming emotion of the book, though, is marrow-echoing lonliness, and here Carlson-Wee’s ability to meld intensity and understatement shines. The narrative is simple (though not linear): two friends scavenge and scam to make do. One goes to Alaska in the summer for the salmon run, so the narrator rents his room as a B&B, stashing the money and continuing to scavenge. Friend returns, comes down with gout (the disease of kings,) is nursed by narrator but, dissatisfied with poverty, leaves. Against this scaffolding the poems hang, refracting a day or a season’s mood.

(Running a B&B brings in money, but it also it brings in characters, and thank goodness. They provide the rare opportunities in this chronicle of isolation to showcase Carlson-Wee’s gift for channeling character through monologue. The gambler, the food inspector, the man who has invented invisible suspenders, do their glorious individual turns, the poet not appropriating the character’s identity but letting them unfurl in full Dickensian glory.)

Disease of Kings is a book about friendship; what it examines, though, is not the idealized notion of the Whitman-comerado, but of the complexities of friendship. The ways you’re different alone, together, with your families, facing the public. On the one hand you have different parents, different problems, but “Isn’t that the secret indulgence / of friendship: being near what you can never be?” On the other hand, there are degrees of scam, of compunction, there’s seeing you’ve been played by your friend—”He knew what he’s doing and he’s doing it anyway.”

In praising Carlson-Wee’s understatement, I don’t want to suggest that his restraint doesn’t pack a wallop. Actually, I’m slightly surprised card-sharping was never one of his scams, since he’s a master at palming aces. One example: tucked into a poem about running his apartment as a B&B, the longest poem in the book, is a passage where the poet returns to see his mother preach her final sermon, and describes her embracing each child, “her bright vestment / enwrapping all but their tufts / of hair.” Then “After the service members of the congregation / kept touching my shoulder—I’d been dragged / to enough funerals to recognize / the gesture.” It was only on rereading the book that I realized this wasn’t a separate poem—and then was able to appreciate the pacing of the larger piece, the lapidary placement.

And then I forgave myself, because Carlson-Wee is the master of the sucker-punch last line. (“I don’t wish you were poor. I wish you were here.”) For that matter, the book’s construction may be its huge, nearly invisible surprise, since the book is prefaced by a single, unsettling poem, and the final section also consists of a solitary, equally unexpected poem which startles the reader into smiling. It’s hard to believe the poet didn’t, too.