The Low Passions bookcover

The Low Passions

Poems
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
Publish DateNovember 24, 2020
Pages112
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780393358582
Dimensions8.0 X 5.4 X 0.1 inches | 0.2 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry

About the Author

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

The Low Passions delivers much more than the sum of its parts. Its organizing principle is memory, memory as it actually operates, recursive, abstract, visceral and obsessive by turns.--Susan Blackwell Ramsey "32poems"
'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, author of The Blue Buick
Carlson-Wee has a true gift for narrative. The poems carve arcs toward illumination.--Todd Davis "Rain Taxi Review"
Carlson-Wee makes everyday language a literary device of its own.... [He has] an uncanny eye for life's terror and beauty.--Dustin Pickering "Ethos Literary Journal"
Incandescent.... We all may have met our match with the enduring star that is Anders Carlson-Wee.--Paris Close "Paperback Paris"
Restless and searching.... [Anders Carlson-Wee has] a strong eye for fleshing out character in a few simple lines.... Readers looking for a dose of Americana will feel like they're beside Carlson-Wee.-- "Publishers Weekly"
The poems Carlson-Wee writes to give voice to the often overlooked have the most impact.... [He] creates a harrowing tribute to the people he met.-- "Booklist"
What sets The Low Passions apart... is its astounding confidence, its palpable self-awareness.... There's wonder and awe throughout these poems.--Corey Van Landingham "West Branch"
Poems as chilling as they are electrifying.--Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Digest
These poems rattle along with energy and awe like the trains that fill these pages.--Dorianne Laux, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Only As the Day Is Long

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