I Know Your Kind: Poems

William Brewer

2017 ira. · Milkweed Editions

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“An eye-opening and haunting journey into the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia—the constantly-chased highs . . . the devastating overdoses.” —Bustle

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. 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.

“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

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

“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.” —Plume

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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.