Disease of Kings
by Anders Carlson-Wee
W. W. Norton & Company, 2023
Review by Maggie Blake Bailey
What Else Could I Do? A review of “Disease of Kings” by Anders Carlson-Wee
The disease of kings is, of course, gout. The phrase elicits the image of later in life Henry the Eighth, unwieldy and gone to seed. And it would be easy to read Carlson-Wee’s latest collection as an indictment of American greed and excess. The speaker of the poems and his friend North scrape by, building a life out of what greed leaves in its wake.
When hungry, like in “Listening to North in the Morning,” the duo “dump[ster] a boatload of eggs” (9). When cash runs low, like in “Moving Sale,” they sell their furniture, claiming a moving sale, when “in truth/ [they] weren’t moving, just using/ the drama to draw shoppers” (19).
They assemble each feast from what is unwanted, rejected. They ride bikes left behind on school campuses in “End of Term,” with North sawing the locks, “a thick/ glitter of metal shavings on his arm” (58). When North moves to Alaska for a season in “B&B,” the speaker rents out the room, knowing to “[keep] the lights low/ so the sheets look clean” (25).
Could this life of resilience and reinvention be the answer to the disease of kings, the disease rotting out the heart of the American Dream? After all, in “Footprint,” the speaker of the poem tells us, “Throw away hundreds of pounds of tea/ and I draw baths thickened with hundreds of bags/ of chamomile” (11). Better to be the one straightening the nails than wasting the finite resources of our world, surely?
The persona poems, often giving voice to the guests of the B&B, among others, flirt with this idea of remedy. In “Barb”, the woman who inspects restaurants knows “[t]he human factor is the biggest bitch./ Cut finger, that kind of thing. If your bleach/ is off one part per million, cute, happy/ to let it slide. But if that puddle of blood didn’t leak from a pieces of veal…” (35). Mistakes can be forgiven, but humans have gone beyond mistakes.
In “Oscar,” the man who has sacrificed his life to impossible inventions becomes a parody of American ingenuity. His wife, he admits, has left him, all trace of her gone: “No photos./ No toothbrush. Not even the carrots/ she raised in the garden beds, just holes/ in the earth like buckshot where she plucked em/ free” (41). The reader knows Oscar is deluded. His invisible invention, that keeps his pants up since “a belt holds on [his] hips about as good/ as an oiled-up pole dancer” cannot be proven, since he claims, “these suspenders are a bitch to get back into.” Oscar states, “Fuck no she didn’t leave me over money,” (41) only to later mention her “fussin over a little loan” (42). But if we scoff at Oscar, should we scoff at ourselves, refusing to name the real problem, investing in impossible solutions instead, boasting when we should be repenting? The poems could be a way to redemption, a guidebook to rejecting the dual traps of pride and the material world.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? A collection of poems that offer a vision of life freed from rot. Nothing about Disease of Kings, however, is interested in letting the reader off easy. And for that, I could not be more grateful. For the speaker of the poems, even saving, even parsimony, even digging through trash and waste has a richness. He hoards how little he needs to make it through, savors his tightness, prizes his own frugality how others might flaunt their wealth.
Afterall, when the aliens come, as imagined in “I Feel Sorry For Aliens,” they will be baffled by “the dissonance between/ the vision that built Venice,/ the vision that built Butte,” the world looking as if “we lived our lives alongside other/ species of us.” The answer does not lie in “one ambition,” given “[h]ow fickle” and “[h]ow slapdash” we know ourselves to be (18).
All this is not to say that the poems abandon or condemn the reader. In “Lay It Bare,” the speaker admits: “I don’t wish you were poor./ I wish you were here” (78). In “Living Alone,” the speaker realizes, “The longer I’m alone/ the smaller a gesture could be/ and still console/ or rattle me. Strange to need/ so little, but to need it/ so badly” (73).
Books teach us how to read them. Disease of Kings opens with “Hired,” where the speaker of the collection is given twenty dollars from a stranger to simply stand in place for ten minutes, where he is already standing. The speaker admits, in the final lines of the poem, “I kept needing/ the car to come back, some sign/ it was over: a horn, a gunshot, the rising/ pitch of oncoming sirens. I could accept/ I’d never know what I’d been used for,/ but I wanted proof it was finished” (3). Work is acceptable; charity, it seems, even such malevolent charity, is not.
The collection closes with “Contact.” The unease of the first poem still echoes, a palimpsest upon which the last poem is written. But the reader, with the speaker, is no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. Kindness is no longer a trick, a darkness, a threat. Now kindness is a form of contact. In the final poem, this means a grocery store employee labeling bags for the man who will sort through the trash for what he needs and wants. The speaker responds to the gesture: “What else could I do? Thank you,/ I wrote in the branches above/ the monkeys. Thank you, I wrote/ in the ocean below the fins” (84).
The answer to gluttony isn’t self-abnegation. Both of those impulses come, Carlson-Wee suggests, from isolation. Kindness matters, the impulse to give. But so does gratitude, the recognition of the gift. Both are required in each of us. Imagine, for a moment, that Carlson-Wee is writing his poems as guides to the reader, letting us know what is “filled with glass,” what offers “the good stuff.” In this way, the poems become the notes, written to help us find what we need to be full. But because this collection refuses to stand still, to be declarative and easily resolved, the poems are also the response.
In “Gout,” an almost titular poem, we see the speaker and North enjoying a gift the speaker has surprised North with, a boat. And upon revelation, North “didn’t ruin it with words” (55). Instead, they simply got in, floating, and “[o]n the far shore, so many cardinals/ had gathered in one tree/ it appeared to be fruiting./ It took [them] all day to float to St. Paul” (55). In reading Disease of Kings, we float for thirty-nine poems. What of North’s opiate addiction? What of the speaker’s discomfort with love? What of the trash we make and ignore?
In the poem “The Juggler,” the busker might stutter in life, but not when he performs: “Af is we could sing what we can’t say./ Catch what we can never hold” (57). In “B&B,” the speaker admits about his mother: “There was no question/ about what mattered or if/ she loved me” (29). “Contact” admits that we “don’t want to trust the messages” (83) of love, of interconnectedness, but the collection, as a whole, dares us to, nonetheless. When the speaker says, “What else could I do?” (84), we say it with him.