I Know Your Kind

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón
From the press:
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. 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.
Blurbs:
“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
“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