The Low Passions: Poems

by Anders Carlson-Wee

In a “trenchantly observed and moving debut” (John James, Kenyon Review ), Anders Carlson-Wee mines nourishment and holiness from the darkest of our human origins. 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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2019

About the author

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of DISEASE OF KINGS (W.W. Norton, 2023), THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize.

Reviews

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pick up the dander loosened as my father folds his hands, lowers his head.
…
I pick up the cross that seesaws his chest
with each step. The day I lost my faith.
The night my dog ran away and came back sick.
The battery pump of her final breath.
Still wondering if she left alone,
or if my father walked her out of this world.
Still wondering what he used for a leash.
…
My friends faded on oxy and percocet. My cousin Josh
buried young in the floodplain. …
Living it over and over each night.
My father walking into every dream.
My fire not bright enough to reveal anything.
Not even his face. Not even the leash.

Anders Carlson-Wee. I'll hold on to that name for a long time, because how could one ever forget such a force — a tempest whirling within a human body — like this? The ache, turmoil, and passion laced beneath the lines of this debut poetry collection, THE LOW PASSIONS, appears all throughout the author’s unabated search for anyplace of warmth, of closure, even if for only a night. This slow stammer toward heaven or hell, for shelter, makes Carlson-Wee a gun loaded with harrowing forgiveness and unflagging memory.

One of the most singularly original voices I’ve read since Maryse Meijer and Edgar Kunz (who's tributed in the collection), Carlson-Wee speaks a language both esoteric and painfully familiar to those untrained in letting go of the ghost of despair. There are over 50 poems in this work and I clung to them all. I’m still tethered to the beauty of "Lodestar," the wish for answers in "Gathering Firewood on Tinpan" (quoted above), the delicate boyhood of "Old Church," the eulogy in "Clausen's Dog," the catharsis of "Shoalwater," the final whisperings in "Listening to a Rail in Mandan," and of course, the many musings of Cousin Josh.

With each poem, another wound re-opens: brothers dumpster dive into the night, possessed by nightmares and survival, faith atrophies in the hearts of the homeless, a flood leaves a ghost town in its wake, littering streets with the relics of lost dogs and loved ones. Every flashback teleports us to new griefs and old graves, but Carlson-Wee makes do with the terms of his storytellers' suffering, turning ashes to angels however he can.

Sending many thanks to both Anders and W. W. Norton Company for allowing me to read THE LOW PASSIONS before it releases this spring. I can't wait to add a finished copy to my shelf. (Also anxious to sift through more, especially the writings of his brother, Kai Carlson-Wee.)

If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

damn good. punches both close & detached, in highly calculated ways

[Richard Leis · Rating 5 out of 5]

With stuff I didn't want to know about the world and reminders of things I don't want to remember, Anders Carlson-Wee's poems in The Low Passions feel like they have exactly the right words, the perfect, accessible, blunt, beautiful, challenging, and surprising words. Each poem has a turn that provoked a gasp and widening of my eyes. What the persona sees in the mirror at the end of "Pride." What the photographs reveal in "Taken In." The dangerous reminder in "Dynamite." The untranslated language of the owls in one of my all-time favorite poems "Birdcalls." How the poems speak to each other in their placement in this collection. The way the first poem introduces and the last poem concludes.

Like other poets I've been reading lately, including W.S. Merwin, I'm learning from Carlson-Wee that poetry doesn't have be archaic and opaque and pompously clever to carry its revelation and mystery. There is heightened danger and wisdom in the matter-of-fact tone, multiple voices, quiet observation, the minimal use of adjectives and adverbs, a little humor, all stark details.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've rarely encountered a book of poems so surefootedly organized, so consistent in voice and place, poem after poem delivering just the right punch without overstepping.

[Sarah Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

From cover to cover, Anders Carlson m-Wee’s The Low Passions, holds me in its embrace. I do not to put it down except to pause between poems, savoring what has just moved me. For lack of a stronger metaphor, reading this collection feels like going on a journey - a trip I know will include moments of intense adventure, and a trip during which I will learn more both about myself and the milk of human kindness, the beauty of strangers. Carlson- Wee’s attention to line integrity, rhythm, pacing and sentence length allows him to build poems that move the way trains move. In “Birdcalls,” we feel that we are out there in the Badlands with the speaker (poet, in this case) and his brother). The poem’s opening line puts us there- “I crept around the dark train yard/ while my brother watched for bulls,” and from that opening, we are there. Likewise in “Icefisher,” I feel and see the moment right in front of me. Carlson-Wee’s imagery is tangible; his lines are both rich and concise. The directness of an image like, “scoops the slush out with a ladle” gives us everything we need. As readers, we are the icefishers. Each time I delve back in to this collection, I see and feel and learn more. I am left with more to ponder about the human spirit, the natural world, and intersection of the two. The speaker of these poems remains vulnerable, always calling us to toward empathy. Empathy and love, and according to Carlson- Wee, “Love exists in the way seagulls hold still/in the wind. The way crabs carry pieces of clam/ through the moonlight and vanish sideways into sand.” The Low Passions feels new to me every time I read it; simultaneously, it feels as familiar as home, or as the road one might call home.

[Christine Maynard · Rating 5 out of 5]

To borrow from Chogyam Trungpa, reading Anders Carlson-Wee’s poetry is like walking outside and having a pancake fall from the sky on your head. Startling.
In poem after poem, eyes are dialed and dilated, unflinching in their capture. The heart aperture is equally open, its orphaned state communicated...alone, anguished yet constant in its call to “Awake!”
“Urge” and “amplify” ramp up the imperative- to peer, listen, be present. Compelling language cultivates awareness, reminding readers, “We can only witness the implication/ only feel for the shape.”
Anders Carlson-Wee communicates boldly, with perfect pitch. Experience and self-inquiry have imbued his poems with power. His alchemy transmutes words as simple as make, cook, and blow into something primal, the Neanderthals he describes hunting mammoths, who “fire-hardened their spears.”
Anders Carlson-Wee’s storytelling quickens one’s recognition of the power present in every moment. If we don’t mine cargo worth carrying, “it is our own asthma that blackens our breath,” he writes in Riding The Owl’s Eye.
The author employs the same economy he embraces in life in his writing; vast understandings are conveyed in tight metaphors and parables. Nothing wasted. He allows the reader to share his vivid, at times hallucinatory point of view.
Cousin Josh’s vernacular along with his colorful take on the world’s end, food stamps, and polar flips punctuate the existential flow. Change is always afoot. The fortune teller’s shop burns down and riders in a Pulse car honor one whose pulse is no more. At Fargo's food bank, a bag boy stands as still as he can although “the wind is in the trees again,” implying his imminent departure. A chest is nestled with near empty plastic water bottles, or gathered wood. Life is precarious, raw and vulnerable yet filled with the ineffable, the sublime.
A purity permeates the poems in The Low Passions. Readers are sure to delight in this debut collection by Anders Carlson-Wee.

[Grant Barber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Authentic, consistent clear voice. Narrator of poems seems to be poet himself, and draws on life-experiences. However--as much as I've been avoiding such poetry of the 1st person disclosure, the poems with last lines which tie everything up in one attempted 'ah-ha,' esp from younger writers, Carlson-Wee is fresh, nary an eye-roll from me in the collection. Seems esp captivated by Neanderthals, which I don't think I've stumbled on in writings of others. Uncle Josh is a recurring great character. AC-W has great ear for vernacular, expressions, turns of phrase. I think I'd be slightly interested in asking him where he got the food-stuffs from if he ever invited me for dinner (extremely unlikely...for myriad of reasons...just read the poems and you'll understand where this caveat comes from). I've inhabited a gray social zone all my life that boarders on the culture depicted--rural N. Carolina in-laws, my own upbringing in S. Ohio, work experience and volunteer time in soup kitchens, homeless shelters. He nails it.

[Lindi Pomeroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

i absolutely adored this collection. every poem brought me deeper into the thematic tensions of the collection, and i especially enjoyed the religious imagery. the latter half of the collection struck me, especially the 'josh' poems near the end. carlson-wee's work with dialectic writing and mix of linguistic traits of the characters represented in his pieces was very impressive, and i was captivated by each poem. definitely recommend :)

[sage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of cool stuff happening here. Much to like.

[George Guida · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of Anders Carlson-Wee's first full-length collection The Low Passions features a figurine of Christ, hands stigmatized and opening his robe to bear a bloody heart. Superimposed over the icon is a half-transparent image of Main Street storefronts in Anytown, U. S. A. Both cover and title allude to the hopes and tribulations of marginally successful and marginalized Americans, trials sacred and secular, ephemeral and elemental. Many of the people who inhabit Carlson-Wee’s poems lead hard lives—some, like the poet’s own vagabond persona, by choice, but most, by necessity. Their passions may be “low” ("low passions" being a term borrowed from evangelical ministry, referring to the earthly and therefore base desires), but they are vital challenges to the constraints of a society which, in Emerson’s words, “is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” The poems of The Low Passions enact Emerson’s dictum that “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.”
Their nonconformity condemns many of Carlson-Wee’s characters, like the recurring Cousin Josh, to stasis, and some, to misery. Josh is a homeless, alcoholic ex-con cancer survivor living off food stamps and trading them for drugs or “sellin em to veterans” for cash; defending himself against the imagined charge of “reachin in and stealin them tax dollars." When he dies his parents must sell their house, car and furniture, to pay for his funeral. Josh's presence ballasts the poet’s own persona in periplum, by living permanently and fully inside his marginalized condition. Carlson-Wee transcends and redeems Josh's condition by rendering it in the colorful language of characters leading humble and often difficult lives in the small towns and cities of the Upper Midwest. He renders it especially well in the fifth of nine Cousin Josh poems interspersed among the book’s other forty-four, entitled “Cousin Josh Goes Off On Food Stamps.”
But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.
Where you think all them sorry-ass one-legged vets
is comin back from? Disneyland?
War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.
Course, neither is food stamps. Lord’s got two hands
and he ain’t askin for handouts with neither of em.
And you can bet your whole hard-on
he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped
prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.
Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.
Real slow and easy.

Carlson-Wee’s appropriation of thought pattern and dialect breathes life into this and the other four poems of which Josh himself is speaker.
Other poems in The Low Passions enact an honest picaro’s quest to escape the stasis of working-class life; a quest that is also a means of rejoining society on the picaro’s own terms. Reading a poem like “Northern Corn,” one imagines the wanderer cradling his notebook as he culls lines from the ether while
Traveling alone through Minnesotan
as the corn comes in. Steel silos filling
to the brim. Black trees leaning
off the south sides of hills as cold light
falls slantwise against the gristmills.

Carlson-Wee captures the speaker's gentle restlessness in the flow of images and in the subtle blending of rhyme and alliteration. He processes his speakers’ journeys more with the tranquil compassion of Gary Snyder or Jack Gilbert than with the darker, more unsettling comprehension of Campbell McGrath or of Carlson-Wee's brother Kai. His travelers are not necessarily pleased or satisfied with what they encounter on their way, but they understand the need to encounter it. As his freight train rolls along, the speaker of “Northern Corn” watches “The ninety-year-old father / …bringing his crop in,” and later in the poem imagines the old man, now ailing, as his own father. “You must go to your father,” he insists,
while he is still your father.
You must hold him. You must kiss him.
You must listen. You must see the son
in the father and wonder. You must admit
that you wonder. Stand above him
and wonder. Drop his swelled-up hand.
Whisper something. Now unplug the machine.

The speaker urges his alter ego to free his father and himself by honoring the older man’s self-reliance. This cycle of journey and return defines much of the poet’s odyssey in vignettes.
These vignettes draw on Carlson-Wee’s greatest strengths, his narrative skill and his empathy. Many of the narratives in The Low Passions communicate the power of compassion. In “Flood of ’97,” a poem that echoes Ted Kooser’s “Abandoned Farmhouse,” the speaker imagines what residents of Fargo found upon returning to their flood-ravaged homes.
An elderly woman returned
to Eventide and discovered a soggy photograph
on the mildewed carpet in her tiny room.
She peered at the blurry faces and tried to remember
going to Egypt. Wondered who the man could be,
standing beside her at the sphinx.

Remarkable is this young poet’s choosing to plumb an old woman's confrontation with loss of both memories and memory itself. In “Clausen’s Dog” he presents the searing image of a dead dog “tied / to a cinderblock with a choke-chain leash,” also the victim of a flood, suggesting that the dog has died in part because of its owner’s crude care. After an uncharacteristically sonorous description of the gruesome discovery, the speaker finds a way beyond its horror to identification with canine consciousness.
When we find Clausen’s dog the bone-paws drag
the bottom like lures, jerking forward
as the same wrist-hinge as the living paws
of a sleeping dog, whimpering, trying to run
inside a dream.

The idea of “trying to run / inside a dream” could apply to many of this collection’s characters, as they make their way through lives few would envy, like the figure at the center of “McDonald’s,” who comes into the fast food restaurant from a “sudden October snow” to warm up, to wash himself in the bathroom and to ask for a cup of water. As in “Northern Corn,” the speaker of “McDonald’s” addresses his subject in the second person, here as a version of himself lacking only divine grace.
Carlson-Wee’s poems lose some urgency when they stray from immediate human struggle into flashes of more distant memory (“Leaving Fargo”) or historical generalization (“Fire”), but even these efforts yield worthwhile images: “The rubble and brick where last winter / a lady carved a swastika into her wrist / before burning down her own fortuneteller business.” The aftermath of suffering remains front and center here and in a number of other poems forming a modest sort of mythic autobiography which never descends into self-indulgence. When the poet's persona hitchhikes and dumpster dives, he pays as much attention to the people he meets and to the redeemable detritus of their lives as to himself and his thoughts. Half of "County 19" focuses on the woman who gives him a ride, her young son, and the speaker's father and grandfather. Much of "Living" is a litany of salvaged items as record of others' experiences: "This bible in a bum camp, this banjo / in a trashcan, this headless mannequin / in a free pile outside Honest Ed's Antiques." When Carlson-Wee does turn the lens on his persona, it is usually to dramatize the quest for freedom. “I want speed. I want new people. To ditch / this slow sanitary drain of golden light, / my pastor parents and their immovable faith,” the speaker of "County 19" confesses. Like the speaker of “Living,” he believes he is making “Life out of nothing,” getting “everything I need for free,” when in fact, as the entirety of The Low Passions makes clear, with that freedom comes the responsibility of conscience.
In both its conscience and its modesty, Carlson-Wee’s work resonates with the work of seekers like Phillip Levine and W. S. Merwin. Even as the romance of the road tugs at him, the speaker of “Great Plains Food Bank” sticks around to help the elderly. Like Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid, this outlaw adventurer fascinates, but unlike the gunslinger, he is a creature of compassion. In a number of poems here, he exists to recognize sacred human bonds and kindness as the world’s most valuable currency. In “Poloroid” a father teaches his fratricidal sons a memorable Cain-and-Abel lesson, while in “Moorcroft” a murderer explains his murder as an act of family preservation, before offering the speaker a place to stay. The poems of this collection overflow with gratitude for such odd generosities, as in “Years Later, I Go Back to Thank You.” Returning to the house of someone who once “found me in a dumpster” and offered a “covered porch where I slept," the Carlson-Wee figure knocks on the door and is greeted by a stranger.
He’s not my family, not my friend. Doesn’t owe me
shit. But just like you, he asks my name,
and where I’m from, and where I’m trying
to get to. And pretty soon, he’s inviting me in.

Such moments of kindness abide in human struggle and in the soul of this poet’s memorable debut.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a link to perhaps his most famous poem:

https://frostplace.org/dynamite-by-an...

[Anders Carlson-Wee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publisher's Weekly Review: The Low Passions
Anders Carlson-Wee. Norton, $26.95 (95p) ISBN 978-0-393-65238-3

The debut from Carlson-Wee 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 [is] 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.)

[Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy knows how to write a damn poem.

[Barbie Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just became an Anders Carlson-Wee fangirl. Being from the Midwest, I immediately recognized the authenticity of Carlson-Wee's take. Besides that, I was quite enamored of his "cousin Josh" poems. Cousin Josh is loonier than a tune, but he's got a lot of stuff to say that's worth pondering. Lots of dogearing of pages during this, my first read, which means I will definitely reread The Low Passions.

[Clay Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fascinating collection touching on many issues. Faith, being the primary concern.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly readable collection of poetry with a unique voice and style. I loved it and look forward to many more books from this poet.