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Name: I Know Your Kind: Poems (National Poetry Series): Brewer, William: 9781571314956: Amazon.com: Books
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Rating: 4.5 (38 reviews)

William Brewer

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I Know Your Kind: Poems (National Poetry Series) Paperback – September 5, 2017

by William Brewer (Author)

4.5 38 ratings

Part of: National Poetry (126 books)

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Milkweed Editions; First Edition (September 5, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1571314954
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1571314956
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #565 in Poetry About Places (Books)
- #1,210 in Death, Grief & Loss Poetry (Books)
- #4,656 in American Poetry (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 38 ratings

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William Brewer

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William Brewer’s debut novel, "The Red Arrow," will be published by Knopf in May 2022. His first book, "I Know Your Kind," was a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he’s currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He lives in Oakland.

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C. Derick Varn

Those brutal mountains

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2019

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William Brewer's "I Know Your Kind: Poems" is brutal and brilliant-- the specter of the opioid epidemic and rural poverty, specifically crushing Appalachian poverty--mars the American landscape. This regional and working-class poetics. Rich, elliptical, and even restrained despite its brutality, Brewer moves on through the crushing weight of narcotics in the coal gray of the eastern US mountains. The struggle with addiction runs through the poems.

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2019

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This book of poetry is both a moving portrayal of addiction, and one of the most beautifully metaphorical depictions of life and death I have ever read. Every metaphor feels fresh and novel. The pastoral imagery becomes a reflection of the emotional difficulties as well as a reflection of the town, Appalachia, and how economy can affect an entire people. Can not recommend enough, especially to anyone who loves reading transcendent imagery.

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Alok Bhardwaj

Excellent!

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2021

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A great collection of poems. Read them. Intense. I would like to hear them read by the poet. Moving. Yes.

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Charlene Franco

Dive in and let it take you on the journey of realization !

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2020

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This is a great read. It’s a devastatingly honest view of addiction! It provokes great thoughts and conversations that need to be had.

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Tea Scar

Stellar Book of Poetry

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2019

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I purchased this because it was a new angle that isn't covered much in poetry collections. The language and themes across the book are really exquisite, I strongly recommend.

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2018

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Poetry ok. Subject matter to disturbing to read about.

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J. Hamon

Oblivion is all we have

Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2018

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There were so many moments while reading this collection when I realized I was holding my breath. I feel that I’ve been filled up with the sorrow of a life that could have been mine.

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Walker Weinman

Poetically enthralling but questionable ethics

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2020

The actual poetry in this little book is a hauntingly mesmerizing view into the rural, Southern opioid epidemic. However, learning that the author didn't, himself, experience these incidents, while using first period language revoked those feelings to hollow. I don't know if I can find myself turning back and putting these reservations aside.

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