Disease of Kings

“Provocative.” —Washington Post

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.