I Know Your Kind

by William Brewer

Overview

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, I Know Your Kind is a haunting, blistering debut collection about the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia.

In West Virginia, fatal overdoses on opioids have spiked to three times the national average. In these poems, William Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late at night and the brother who closes the door. He shows us the high, at once numbing and transcendent: “this warm moment when I forget which part of me / I blamed.” He shows us the overdose, when “the poppies on my arms / bruised red petals.” And he shows us the mourner, attending his high school reunion: “I guess we were underdressed: / me in my surf shoes / you in an urn.” Underneath and among this multiplicity of voices runs the Appalachian landscape—a location, like the experience of drug addiction itself, of stark contrasts: beauty and ruin, nature and industry, love and despair.

Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, I Know Your Kind is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314956
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

William Brewer is the author of Oxyana, which was awarded the Poetry Society of America's 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, and A Public Space, among others. Brewer is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He was born and raised in West Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

DAEDALUS IN OXYANA

Was an emperor of element within the mountain's hull,
chewing out the corridors of coal,

crafting my labyrinth as demanded.
My art: getting lost in the dark.

Now I practice craving;
it's the only maze I haven't built myself and can't dismantle.

I gave my body to the mountain whole.
For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses.

Refill, refill, refill, until they stopped.
Then I fixed on scraping out my veins,

a trembling maze, a skein of blue.
Am lost in them like a bull

that's wandered into endless, frozen acres.
Times my simple son will shake me to,

syringe still hanging like a feather from my arm.
What are you always doing, he asks.

Flying, I say. Show me how, he begs.
And finally, I do. You'd think

the sun had gotten lost inside his head,
the way he smiled.

* * *

WITHDRAWAL DREAM WITH FEATHER AND KNIFE

I woke one winter morning to find all my pain as a lone white boulder in the yard with a brilliant woodpecker, its head enflamed with red feathers, chiseling fruitlessly at the bone-colored surface.
I walked over the frosted grass and snow,
glass needles in my soles, to give the bird a knife. Wind through the iced branches like a finger kissing a crystal rim.
In its steel-strong beak, the bird took the knife and stabbed my hand,
and nothing happened. But the day,
though I know not how exactly,
reorganized itself, each grain of snow,
gears in a blurred engine, fell up to the sky, through me, through the way things could have been,
and I understood that—much in the way we misname some snow as blizzard when it's only snowing with such purpose that we're estranged from its wonder—
that whatever I have ruined,
I have ruined according to plan.
* * *

AGAINST ENABLING

You can't come here anymore, not like this. I said that, it's true,
and because of love, turned my brother away to the dark.

The night was as still as a just-snuffed candle, until there came,
as there always comes after such stillness—or how,

after you've done the right thing—you're doing the right thing,
I whispered to my self, I confess—helplessness descends—

thunderheads cracking their knuckles. The rain fell straight down.
Between us turning from each other, a greater kind of trust, I told myself.

And later, like someone smashing clocks on the roof, lightning.
We survived the night, only to find, as was true of the morning,

we were not who we thought we were. An unexpected chill,
a small relief. Fall had dragged its brush of tangerine across the trees.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA
ICARUS IN OXYANA
HALFWAY HOUSE DIARY
CLEAN DAYS IN OXYANA
FOR KC AFTER LOSING HIS BROTHER
OXY 40
DOG DAYS
VOICES AS OF LIONS COMING DOWN
TO THE ADDICT THAT MUGGED ME
EARLY OXYANA: AN ANECDOTE
DAEDALUS IN OXYANA
WE BURN THE BULL
NALOXONE
WITHDRAWAL DREAM OF A ROW OF GEORGIAN TREES
LEAVING THE PAIN CLINIC
SUNDOWNING
ORIGIN OF SILENCE
WITHDRAWAL DREAM AMONGST SPRING ACREAGE
APPALACHIA, YOUR GENESIS
MY SOMNILOQUIST
OVERDOSE PSALM
RESOLUTION
DETOX PSALM
WHAT WE CAN REPLACE
WITHDRAWAL DREAM WITH FEATHER AND KNIFE
IN THE NEW WORLD
WEST VIRGINIA
HALFWAY HOUSE DIARY
TO HIS ENABLER
WITHDRAWAL DREAM ON THE CAPE
AGAINST ENABLING
PLAYING ALONG
ODE TO SUBOXONE
THE GOOD NEWS
LETTER IN RESPONSE TO A LETTER FROM HER SON
RELAPSE PSALM
IN THE ROOM OF THE OVERDOSED, AN EMBER
THE MESSENGER OF OXYANA
EXPLANATION OF MATTER IN OXYANA
TODAY I TOOK YOU TO OUR OXYANA HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
ASCENT
OXYANA, WV: EXIT SONG
THERE IS A GOLD LIGHT

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/26/2017
Brewer descends the rabbit hole of opioid addiction and its cycles of despair in his penetrating debut. He covers the gamut of experiences from withdrawal to rehab to relapse, and the idle helplessness of watching friends and family succumb to the disease. Brewer’s expert descriptions of his hometown of Oceana, W.Va., (nicknamed “Oxyana” for the drug whose use has spread there) evoke a sinister, deathly presence, with “fog-strangled mornings” and “rain choking the throats of smokestacks,” a landscape Brewer penetratingly connects to the addict’s brain. “Smog from the steam engine/ of dementia tints your hair,” Brewer writes, “your synapses scatter// in the late December forest of your mind.” The stunning and spare “Resolution” captures the decisive moment of choosing sobriety, its pathos and clarity so strong it is compared to the invention of the window, “All that light bursting in.” Brewer’s creative syntax and line breaks bolster his dark and vivid imagery, especially in a few downright unforgettable instances. “Oxyana” is both a real place and a fantastical mental prison, a symbol for addiction with religious and mythological references scattered throughout. Anyone familiar with addiction will recognize Oxyana’s metaphorical scenery in all its absurd and devastating iterations. Despair-inducingly relevant as opioid deaths soar across America, Brewer’s depiction of his triumph over his “shrieking private want” is a revelation. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for I Know Your Kind

“The opioid crisis has plagued poet William Brewer’s hometown in West Virginia. His vivid poems tell the story of the opioid epidemic from different voices and depict the sense of bewilderment people find themselves in as addiction creeps into their lives.”—PBS NewsHour

“There's these incredibly dreamy, mythic images . . . of people stumbling, of people hoping, of people losing each other. I love this book because it brought us into such empathy and compassion and tenderness towards this suffering.”—NPR

“William Brewer [is] America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis. . . .Brewer sums up this new world.”—New York Magazine

"William Brewer's exquisite I Know Your Kind is a rare confluence of addiction and surrender in an unsung American landscape. The poems brilliantly attend to the world with surreal lyricism, bitterly truthful narratives, and an ache that's eased by the thing that saves: language. This work quakes and blooms and dares us to try to resist the world's grace."—Ada Limón

"Brewer's collection is a prime example for what can be accomplished when a poetical praxis is used to implement large and tricky-to-wield questions, particularly by moving outward to thoroughly probe an epidemic as it effects a state, a region, a people—as well as the individual. It holds our gazes to the underbelly and shows us that here, too, the imagination thrives and, like all undeniable art, is written in spite of all the things that work to silence it."—Ocean Vuong

“A timely work of uncommon craft and artistry . . . Deeply affecting, the book showcases Brewer’s prodigious gifts; he assembles arresting metaphors that won’t soon fade from memory.”—Guernica

“Rooted in rural Appalachia, electric with insight and music, William Brewer’s poems explore the wreckage of addiction. In language that’s luminous and surreal, he makes visible the fractured lives of people moving in and out of halfway houses, pain clinics, and gymnasiums ‘full of coffins / full of smaller coffins / full of Oxys.’ The poems are elegiac, viscerally present, and reveal the interiority of those struggling at the margins of our society. Brewer is an immensely gifted poet. I Know Your Kind is a commanding debut.”—Eduardo C. Corral

“Balancing difficult material with refined style, I Know Your Kind gives voice to a submerged perspective and creates a startling experience . . . in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot. . . . his lines have an ability to set and to shift like striated sediments on a cliff face.”—Ploughshares

“Pitch-perfect and tightly focused . . . Brewer displays concision alongside journalistic skills, demonstrating how the rise in addiction matches declines in hope.”—Steph Burt, American Poets

“I Know Your Kind will take you on an eye-opening and haunting journey into the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia—the constantly-chased highs, the crippling lows, the devastating overdoses, and the lives that the American healthcare debate doesn’t even come close to considering.”—Bustle

“I Know Your Kind may be one of this year’s most important books of verse since its brutal music confronts the taboos of addiction while simultaneously offering hope for overcoming them. . . . Brewer captures the horrors of substance abuse, the spiritual rigors of recovery, and ultimately, the fraught relationship between an obliterated landscape and self-obliteration.”—Plume

“Brewer begins in I Know Your Kind the work of unraveling assumptions about addiction and about the people of Oceana, [West Virginia]. . . . In voices that are manic and breathless, lucid and gut-wrenching, Brewer reminds us that change can be possible, but might be very hard to come by in a place like this.”—The Arkansas International

From the Publisher

07/01/2017
Brewer opens this pointedly forthright debut collection with an epigraph explaining that the town of Oceana, WV, was nicknamed Oxyana for its high incidence of OxyContin abuse, and the name surfaces throughout this chronicle of addiction and social consequence. "Bars, pool halls,/ neighbors turn me away, but not churches" says one speaker unpityingly (he's actually looking for air conditioning) and, after an overdose, "Oblivion is liberating." Elsewhere, a brother shuts the door on a user ("You can't come here anymore, not like this") and a man comes to after being mugged by an addict with rain in his face "clear as gin." The tragedy keeps coming—the epigraph further explains that heroin has replaced OxyContin as the drug of choice, with West Virginia now claiming the highest fatal overdose rate in America. But the tone is less cri de coeur than calm, determined observation. VERDICT Though occasionally one wants more edge, this is a thoughtful collection that can be approached by all readers.

Library Journal