The Low Passions: Poems

by Anders Carlson-Wee

Overview

In a knockout debut collection haunted by shame, violence, and the darkest of our human origins, Anders Carlson-Wee mines nourishment and holiness from our depths.

Explosive and incantatory, The Low Passions traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter. Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith. A range of strong-willed characters takes shape, amplified by a chorus of monologues from the strangers who shelter him and the family he’s left behind—each made manifest by the poet’s devoted ear and sensitive eye.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652383
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	1,277,920
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anders Carlson-Wee’’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, Buzzfeed, and many other publications. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Riding the Owl's Eye 1

County 19 3

Dynamite 5

Finding Josh 7

Great Plains Food Bank 8

Leaving Fargo 9

Birdcalls 12

Living 14

Icefisher 16

McDonald's 17

Primer 19

The Muscles in Their Throats 21

Lodestar 23

Gathering Firewood on Tinpan 24

Cousin Josh on Doomsday 25

Asking for Work at Flathead Bible 27

Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Treehouse 29

To the Rail Cop at Rathdrum 31

Earshot 33

Flood of '97 34

The Raft 36

Cousin Josh on Family 37

Old Church 39

Moorcroft 40

Living with the Accident 41

Fire 43

Polaroid 44

Lillian 45

Short Bed 47

Between Boulders 49

Cousin Josh Goes Off on Food Stamps 50

Clausen's Dog 53

Checking for Ticks 55

Lyle Clears My Throat 56

Pride 59

News 60

St. Mary's Memorial 61

Cousin Josh on Lighthouse Mission 62

Soft Hunting 64

The Mark 66

Northern Corn 68

Cutting for Sign 70

Butte 71

Cousin Josh on His Liver 72

Affording the Funeral 74

Shoalwater 75

Ms. Range Wants to See Me in It 77

Taken In 78

The Low Passions 79

Years Later, I Go Back to Thank You 81

After Fighting 83

To My Cousin Josh with Nothing 84

Listening to a Rail in Mandan 86

Notes 89

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

03/18/2019

The debut from Carlson-Wee (whose poem “How-To” in the Nation was the subject of controversy last year) is restless and searching, taking readers through the truck cabs, living rooms, dumpsters, freight yards, and railways of America’s wide middle, a place where “Each day against all this/ breaking news, another stranger saving you.” With a strong eye for fleshing out character in a few simple lines, Carlson-Wee introduces the reader to pastors, bosses, one crazy cousin in Fargo (poems about whom recur throughout the book as both comic relief and a source of despair), a “father walking into every dream,” and a brother who is a burden, blessing, and companion. Violence pervades the collection, with brothers lashing out against each other both as children and adults. The kindness of strangers and the pride of a hardscrabble ethos are recurring themes, as in the poem “Pride,” in which Carlson-Wee tallies the value of the food for which he’s just dumpster dived while strolling through the store. Readers looking for a dose of Americana will feel like they’re beside Carlson-Wee, catching “a ride from a farmer hauling a trailer/ stacked with hay bales three-high. When he asks me/ where I’m going I say as far as you can take me.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

'If you don’t live it,' Charlie Parker said of his own music, 'it won’t come out of your horn.' Anders Carlson-Wee is a balladeer who has certainly lived his song. The Low Passions makes a Walden Pond of the railyard and cornucopias of every dumpster behind a strip mall. It paints portraits akin to those of James Agee, but to be captivated by them solely is to risk overlooking the urgency of experience in this debut collection. As terror drives the sublime and duende keeps one cold foot in the grave, these poems are as chilling as they are electrifying. Yet the perils of life off the grid are relieved by the light of inexplicable kindnesses discovered along the way. Through it all is the ever-loving American landscape, divine and brutal as Dillard’s Tinker Creek.

Gregory Pardlo

'Our fresh buzzcuts / lumpy with goose eggs. It’s easy to forget / we were trying to kill each other.' So writes the remarkable new poet Anders Carlson-Wee in The Low Passions. I first encountered his poems at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference three years ago. Ah, I thought, a poet of the contemporary Midwest who actually knows it. I was amazed by the precision and authenticity of this post–Nick Adams voice that is so utterly free of regional stereotype, false colors, and the standard rural and small-town themes and subject matter. Anders inhabited a world within a world of train yards, sibling (and other) violence, the dangers of the road, and a crazy cousin whose monologues sound awfully close to wisdom. Rather than repeating the cheap tunes of nostalgia, America would do better to read Carlson-Wee and a poetry that reassumes its ancient task of truth-telling.

B. H. Fairchild

The Low Passions is an ode to America, the distances between place and people, the desire to quiet the self in order to better hear the world. Shaped through glimpses of a life in motion, these poems rattle along with energy and awe like the trains that fill these pages. If the work feels wild, there is also a feeling of tenderness as Anders Carlson-Wee reflects on childhood and brotherhood, what family means, and how a stranger can feel like family. The Low Passions reminds us to go out each day in wonder ready for the unknown to call to us.

Dorianne Laux

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