Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: I Know Your Kind
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1989
WEBSITE: https://williambrewer.net/
CITY: Oakland
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-brewer * https://milkweed.org/author/william-brewer
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1989, in WV.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, editor, and educator. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Wallace Stegner Fellow.
AWARDS:I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series winner, for I Know Your Kind; , selected for the Poetry Society of America’s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship, selected for chapbook Okyana.
WRITINGS
Also author of the poetry chapbook Oxyana. Work has appeared in periodicals and journals, including the Boston Review, the Iowa Review, Narrative, the Nation, New England Review, and the New Yorker.
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in West Virginia, poet William Brewer started out being more interested in the visual arts. “My reading/writing life didn’t begin until high school, with no serious literary or “writing” education until I was eighteen,” Brewer noted in an interview with Hafizah Geter for the Pen America website, adding: “Visual art taught me about the primacy of careful, deliberate observation. Making the shift to writing was, at its core, about translating that sense data into a word-based, instead of visually-based, language. Whether it’s a painting or a poem or a passage of prose, my goal is to make someone see.”
Brewer’s poetry has appeared in periodicals and literary journals. His first full-length collection of poems, titled I Know Your Kind: Poems, focuses on the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia. Winner of the National Poetry Series selected by the poet Ada Limón, I Know Your Kind explores the opioid epidemic via the town of Oceana, West Virginia, where so much opioid abuse occurs that it has been called “Oxyana” in reference to the opioid oxycodone, or oxycontin. The debut collection “is both a real place and a fantastical mental prison, a symbol for addiction with religious and mythological references scattered throughout,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Writing for Ploughshares Online, Mike Good remarked: “With scars across its pages, I Know Your Kind conveys the pervasive shadow the opioid epidemic casts across Oceana—and, by extension, towns like Oceana—in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot,”
Brewer’s poems delve into the dehumanizing effects of opioid addiction. For example in the poem titled “To the Addict Who Mugged Me,” an addict who loses via a robbery his last bit of drugs to get high, remarks: “What’s more brutal:/A never-ending dial tone/chewing the receptors in your brain,/or waking up in an alley with a busted face,/teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain/coming down clear as gin?” In this poem and throughout the poems in I Know Your Kind Brewer delves into the workings of the addict’s brain, writing in one poem “your synapses scatter/in the late December forest of your mind.”
I Know Your Kind “is a thoughtful collection that can be approached by all readers,” wrote Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal. Calling I Know Your Kind “a mixed bag” and writing that Brewer’s enthusiasm for abstract images sometimes gets the better of him,” Sewanee Reviews Online contributor Spencer Hupp nevertheless went on call some of the poems “masterful” and the poem titled “Withdrawal Dream on the Cape” the collection’s “most enchanting poem.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, July 1, 2017, Barbara Hoffert, “This Year’s Five Honorees Explore Personal Anguish and Social Issues: national Poetry Series Winners,” p. 86.
Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2017, review of I Know Your Kind, p. 151.
ONLINE
Penn America Website, https://pen.org/pen-ten-william-brewer/ (September 5, 2017), Hafizah Geter, “The Pen Ten with William Brewer.”
Ploughshares Online, http://blog.pshares.org/ (September 8, 2017), Mike Good, review of I Know Your Kind.
Plume, http://plumepoetry.com/ (August 1, 2017), Adam Tavel, “In this Onth’s Installment, Reviews Editor Adam Tavel Examines a Devastating Debut about Opioid Addiction.”
Sewanee Review Online, https://thesewaneereview.com (October 1, 2017), Spencer Hupp, review of I Know Your Kind.
William Brewer Website, https://williambrewer.net (April 9, 2018).
THE PEN TEN WITH WILLIAM BREWER
By: Hafizah Geter
September 5, 2017
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Hafizah Geter, editor at Little A and Day One from Amazon Publishing, speaks to poet and Stegner fellow William Brewer, whose poetry collection, I Know Your Kind, is out this week.
Hafizah writes: By now we’ve all seen the studies that show reading improves one’s empathy. And if you’re a writer, you’ve probably been told that if you want be a better writer become a better reader. Perhaps no greater proof of this exists than in poet Will Brewer. In the years I have known him, Will has proven to be one of the most voracious readers I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps, this is most evident in his writing. In one of the best poetry books of 2017, Will employs the language of ruin to excavate the lost and to reach into the heart of the opioid epidemic ravishing his home state of West Virginia. In his debut collection, I Know Your Kind, selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, the only thing more open than Will’s mind is his heart as he enters the lion’s den of addiction. Will approaches, with equal compassion and empathy, the loved ones ravaged by opioids alongside the family members who enable and the ones who shut tight their doors. Will examines how, in the hills of Appalachia, addiction can be a tradition as fiercely rooted as the landscape and as seemingly insurmountable as the poverty that crushes it. With his full, huge heart, Will champions the humanity of the lost and forsaken, the loved ones turned drug addicts turned walking dead and those who stay and hold onto what remains. Read more of Will’s work at: williambrewer.net.
When did being a writer begin to inform your sense of identity?
I was a visual artist before I was a writer. My reading/writing life didn’t begin until high school, with no serious literary or “writing” education until I was 18. Visual art taught me about the primacy of careful, deliberate observation. Making the shift to writing was, at its core, about translating that sense data into a word-based, instead of visually-based, language. Whether it’s a painting or a poem or a passage of prose, my goal is to make someone see, which goes back to the position of observer, which I think I’ve always been.
Where is your favorite place to write?
I do it at a desk in my apartment. I have a dream of a nice studio, but until then, the desk works fine.
Obsessions are influences—what are yours?
For me, at the atomic level, the obsession around which all my other obsessions orbit is seeing and making others see. That is because—and maybe this is at the subatomic level—this is the closest I get to a spiritual, or more generally mystical, experience. Reading a passage by Woolf, seeing a painting by de Kooning, or entering the state while writing when I dissolve and my imagination/mind takes over—these are experiences that press me up against The Mystery. Anything I choose as a subject I choose because I see cracks of The Mystery shining through. To quote a line by DeLillo: “I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.”
What is the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?
I don’t think I’ve ever been daring with words.
What is the responsibility of the writer?
To write to the absolute best of their abilities. Only through that can the other work happen.
While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose?
Writers keep us connected to our language—its power, its vitality, and its vulnerability.
Recognizing years of cultural theft and appropriation, to whom would you like to give back the crown?
Isn’t the crown the problem?
How has the very public mainstreaming of bigotry and more visible and documented police violence resonated in your personal life and writing?
I don’t think I can say that these things have resonated in my writing specifically. That said, my book argues for a humane engagement with, and examination of, the opioid epidemic, which law enforcement has treated primarily as a criminal crisis. That said, some really positive changes have been made, primarily at the local level, to treat this as the health crisis that it is. Some federal progress was made as well, but that has since been turned back by the current administration (shocker). The criminal approach as the default response is representative of power’s irrepressible drive to dehumanize. I’d like to think my work pushes against that.
What book would you send to a government leader, domestic or foreign, who censors (or inhibits) marginalized and/or dissenting voices?
I’m a great admirer of Primo Levi, so something by him would be a good start, but my guess is that anyone that exhibits these tyrannical impulses isn’t much of a reader.
Where is the line between observation and surveillance?
The answer is in the words, in their very origins. To paraphrase etymonline.com: Surveillance comes from the French, meaning “oversight, supervision, watch,” but even more precisely, “a word that came to English from the Terror in France (‘surveillance committees’ were formed in every French municipality in March 1793 by order of the Convention to monitor the actions and movements of suspect persons, outsiders, and dissidents).” As for observation, going back even before it meant “watch, perceive, notice,” is Latin observare, “watch over, note, heed, look to, attend to, guard, regard, comply with,” from ob “in front of, before” + servare “to watch, keep safe.” One is from a position of power. One is from a position of care.
William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship selection. Currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in Oakland.
Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and co-curates the reading series EMPIRE with Ricardo Maldonado. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and West Branch, among others. She is on the poetry committee and book ends committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival and is currently an editor for Little A and Day One from Amazon Publishing.
William Brewer was born and raised in West Virginia. He is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.
William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, selected for the Poetry Society of America's 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Narrative (where it was awarded the 30 Below Prize), The Nation, New England Review, The New Yorker, and other journals. Currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he was born and raised in West Virginia.
This year's five honorees explore personal anguish and social issuse: national poetry series winners
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal. 142.12 (July 1, 2017): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Brewer, William. I Know Your Kind. Milkweed. Sept. 2017. 88p. ISBN 9781571314956. pap. $16. POETRY
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.
Dingman, Chelsea. Thaw. Univ. of Georgia. Sept. 2017. 96p. ISBN 9780820351315. pap. $19.95. POETRY
In her debut collection, Dingman deftly parallels intimate sorrow with the brutal realities of rural poverty and violence. Throughout, she's quietly harrowing as she speaks of losing a mother ("I had/ a mother then. I held the wind/ in my throat like a song") and a father ("He's// a terrible dream"), of children succumbing to a fatal disease ("Their mothers/ wait years for a chest to flutter// closed") and the crushing, troubled passions of couples ("tongues/ on fire, two people dancing/to our own screams"). The backdrop is equally unsettling: there's a "starved town" and "only mountains, snow circling our house/ like crows' wings." The opening poem, about a hunting accident, shows "how a bullet/ can enter so quietly as to leave/ a skull almost intact." VERDICT Dingman sets her scenes well, with the tough rhythms of life coming through, and her excellent work will be appreciated by a range of readers.
Pimentel, Sasha. For Want of Water: And Other Poems Beacon. Oct. 2017. 120p. ISBN 9780807027851. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9780807027868. POETRY
In this urgent and lyrically astute new compilation, Philippines-born Pimentel, winner of the American Book Award for Insides She Swallowed, writes about the huge divide between El Paso, TX, and murder-slicked, drug war-ravaged Juarez directly across the Rio Grande. Accomplished poet that she is, Pimentel does not offer reportage but leaps from a beginning poem, "If I Die in Juarez" ("The violins in our home are emptied/ of sound") to meditations on male violence, female vulnerability, and desert-driven thirst that touch fiercely if impressionistically on the topic. "House of her body, animal in grief" says Pimentel in a fine, multipaneled portrait of her mother, who appears elsewhere as a bride awaiting a goat's sacrifice at her wedding. In other poems, a couple trembles on the brink, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss appears less than tender, and, in the title piece, a boy trudging across the sands cannot waste bodily fluid in tears. VERDICT Affecting and well wrought; Pimentel is a poet to watch.
Sax, Sam. Madness. Penguin. Oct. 2017. 96p. ISBN 9780143131700. pap. $18; ebk. ISBN 9781524705572. POETRY
In this beautifully concentrated howl of a book, a startling debut, queer Jewish writer and educator Sax explores mental illness, addiction, and the unshakable grip of sexual desire. He's clearly one to feel things intensely ("life ripping open before me/led to me being ripped open by life"), and the poems can be relentless, painful reading. But however raw, they're also coolly crafted; readers can admire Sax for the sharply observed sentiment "anything can be a drug if you love it," followed swiftly by "anyone can be a drug if you love him," while also appreciating how effectively those lines echo each other. Sax can be both funny ("thank you// science for teaching me what to fear most") and angry (his poems are "wild birds/ pecking eyeholes in the windows of hotels"), and he's refreshingly frank as he speaks out to us ("spare me the lecture/ on the survival/of my body/ & i will spare you my body." VERDICT A terrific first collection; highly recommended for poetry lovers.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Schultz, Jeffrey. Civil Twilight. Ecco: HarperCollins. Oct. 2017. 104p. ISBN 9780062678980. pap. $15.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062678997. POETRY
Already the winner of National Poetry Series honors for 2013's What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other, polished poet Schultz shows his craft in long, cleanly reticulated lines. As he opens with admonitions that we live blindly and mechanically, "perched at perception's precipitous edge," and situated in a history we ignore (the latest version is "like just another block of vacants recolonized after being boarded up"), a sense of ponderousness, of didacticism, creeps in. But Schultz can be bitterly funny and discerning about contemporary life ("ever since the courts upheld/ Corporations' rights to marry they seem hardly interested in us"), and throughout he urges the kind of vigilant awareness that poetry exemplifies. The title poem is masterly, moving from the "bland abstract expressionism" of America's landscapes to the "beauty of transgression," as demonstrated by 19th-century Parisian rioters and Sixties students, whom Ronald Reagan said he wanted to meet with a bloodbath, to the speaker's absorption in life's superficialities as a friend suffers. VERDICT Weighty but worth it for serious poetry readers.
By Barbara Hoffert
Barbara Hoffert is Prepub Alert Editor, LJ
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "This year's five honorees explore personal anguish and social issuse: national poetry series winners." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612723/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0cba310f. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497612723
I Know Your Kind
Publishers Weekly. 264.26 (June 26, 2017): p151+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* I Know Your Kind
William Brewer. Milkweed, $16 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-57131-495-6
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"I Know Your Kind." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 151+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444224/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=05868d29. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444224
Review: I KNOW YOUR KIND by William Brewer
Author: Guest Reviewer |
Sep
08
2017
Posted In Book Reviews, Poetry
I Know Your Kind
William Brewer
Milkweed Editions; Sept 2017
77 pp; $16
Buy: paperback
Reviewed by Mike Good
A winner of the National Poetry Series selected by Ada Limón, William Brewer’s debut full-length collection plunges into the depths America’s opioid epidemic in the town of Oceana, West Virginia. At the center of the book’s cover lies the silhouette of a spoon; within the silhouette are the stars of the night sky. The cover image recalls one of many standout poems in this stunning collection, “To The Addict Who Mugged Me,” where Brewer wryly attempts to forgive the assailant in the aftermath of being assaulted, writing “Wherever you are// with your stamp bag of winter,/your entire universe boiling/ in the breast of a spoon.” A stamp bag is a small stamp-sized bag containing heroin, presumably stolen from the speaker. With scars across its pages, I Know Your Kind conveys the pervasive shadow the opioid epidemic casts across Oceana—and, by extension, towns like Oceana—in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot.
The first epigraph offers the source of the book’s title: a line from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, priming the volume for extended scenes of desolation. If violence colors the desert landscape in McCarthy’s book, causing characters to lose their humanity, addiction and the attempts to escape dependence colors Appalachia’s fields, mountains, and people with acute tragedy. The second epigraph explains Oceana’s appellation, “Oxyana,” due to the town’s high concentration of OxyContin abuse. Upon reading this book, one cannot help but reckon with both the brute impact of the epidemic on users in addition to the less-seen effect on extended family, loved ones, friends, and throughout communities.
Numerous lines suggest addiction’s defamiliarizing and dehumanizing effects. What is so remarkable about this poet is his ability play a lead role in each scene while describing the action with unattached observation. For instance, in “Naloxone” (Naloxone is a drug administered in the event of an opioid overdose), Brewer writes, “Someone//found me in a coffee shop bathroom/after I’d overdone it//and carried me like a feed sack/to the curb.” The lead actor both becomes scenery and describes himself disappearing from the stage. This simile is one example of Brewer’s figurative language that clings to the reader long after words are spent.
Structurally, the book contains no sections, forming a continuous stream of lyric and narrative. Often, lyrical poems address the landscape, anchoring the personal to a larger context and speaking in a collective “we,” whereas the speaker of the narrative poems appears to be a close stand-in to Brewer. Rather than sequencing series of poems consecutively, linked poems such as “Icaraus in Oxyana” and “Daedulus in Oxyana” offer distant echoes a dozen pages apart. Forgoing narrative and formal ordering helps arrest the notion that a straight path exists between dependence and sobriety. Instead, an image or a phrase frequently connects poems. Brewer also sprinkles certain words throughout the collection, including “gravity,” “light,” “gold,” “dark” “night,” “bone,” and “brass,” adding aesthetic cohesion and a Neolithic backdrop for poems to unfold.
In many ways, I Know Your Kind recalls Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds, in-part due to the way poems appear on the page and due to each poet’s particular contemporization of Greek mythology. In Brewer’s best constructions, his lines have an ability to set and to shift like striated sediments on a cliff face. For instance, the first three lines of the collection begin, “None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,/ the fog-strangled mornings of March,/cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks.” The first line establishes point of view while evoking a sprawling grandiosity to the landscape and connecting the speaker to a regional narrative. The second line has the feel of classic poetry with “fog-strangled mornings” a distant cousin of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” The third line wrenches us from the cosmic, pulling us back to the earth, with the visceral and vernacular.
Rather than offering epiphanies and conversions, the politics of Brewer’s poetry reflect an overwhelming sense that a great injustice was inflicted upon land and people. Occasionally, Brewer casts blame on corporations and politicians for creating Oceana’s environment. However, they take a backseat to the people within poems who never lose volition, and the poet condescends to neither reader nor subject. Instead the book demonstrates awareness that its audience is comprised of outsiders, earning lines like, “…if most people/ can’t conceive of the earth wanting something so badly/ that it’ll throw away life once it gets it,// how can I expect them to believe in my suffering?” Balancing difficult material with refined style, I Know Your Kind gives voice to a submerged perspective and creates a startling experience.
Mike Good’s recent poetry and reviews have appeared on the 32 Poems blog, in Forklift, OH, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and The Hollins Critic. He holds an M.F.A. from Hollins University and helps edit the After Happy Hour Review. He is from Pittsburgh, where he works as a grant writer.
Review: William Brewer
Adam Tavel
In this month’s installment, reviews editor Adam Tavel examines a devastating debut about opioid addiction.
Screen Shot 2017-08-25 at 9.15.49 AM
I Know Your Kind by William Brewer
Milkweed Editions
$16, 95 pages
published September 2017
According to a recent New York Times article, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Perhaps no region has been as decimated as Appalachia, where a handful of states account for one-fifth of all overdose deaths in the U.S. William Brewer’s first book, selected by Ada Limón for the National Poetry Series, casts its aching, hallucinatory poems against this backdrop of addiction and hopelessness in the poet’s native West Virginia—particularly the town of Oceana, which has earned the sinister nickname Oxyana. I Know Your Kind endures as a riveting and poignant debut where Brewer captures the horrors of substance abuse, the spiritual rigors of recovery, and ultimately, the fraught relationship between an obliterated landscape and self-obliteration.
Brewer renders addiction with exacting savagery, never sparing readers from the monotonous and escalating damage it inflicts upon the mind and body. In “To the Addict Who Mugged Me,” we encounter a dope-sick speaker who has been robbed of his last hit, who asks himself and us, “What’s more brutal:/A never-ending dial tone/chewing the receptors in your brain,/or waking up in an alley with a busted face,/teeth red and penny-sweet, the rain/coming down clear as gin?” It’s a rueful rhetorical question, since the speaker endures both of those sufferings—withdrawal and assault—which makes the poem’s last turn more striking. Seeing his own desperation reflected in the mugger’s crime, the speaker ends liturgically, hoping that “this throbbing in my brain/is now the sound of your rowing toward/what I pray is, if not home, then mercy.” A terse, alliterative lyric, “Leaving the Pain Clinic” wrestles with the shame and impatience of lying one’s way through medical bureaucracy to garner a bogus pill prescription. What makes the poem all the more haunting is the realization that the speaker is only one among many in the waiting room pursuing this same ruse, and when the pills kick in, it’s like the “soft rain of sparks that pity sometimes is,/how it mends the past like a welder seams metal.” A related poem, “Early Oxyana: An Anecdote,” sparsely recounts how the speaker and his friend Tom flipped a coin to see who would get their hand bashed with a hammer in order to justify a trip to the emergency room. One of the most disturbing truths acknowledged in I Know Your Kind is that an opioid high is genuinely ecstatic, a fact that Brewer, to his credit, presents not as a rationalization, or as a justification, but as an explanation. “In the New World,” the collection’s lone prose poem, OxyContin is “a moon’s tooth,” a needle is “god’s antenna,” and heroin is “heavenquick,” and each morning addicts “wake up astonished / in a heap of golden dust / with nothing left.”
Despite the book’s focus on the daily depravities of addiction, I Know Your Kind dedicates just as much space, if not more, to detailing the rocky road to recovery, which Brewer depicts in potent spiritual terms. Indeed, as the book unfurls, even his titles turn scriptural: “Overdose Psalm,” “The Good News,” “The Messenger of Oxyana.” Lyrical and imagistic, “Clean Days in Oxyana” offers a striking meditation on “the five buck/heads over Crockett’s bar,” as the speaker ponders if “one of them must have wanted it, if only/a little, the end—an orange star blooming/between the elms.” By comparing a fatal hunting wound to addiction’s bleakness, Brewer spotlights early sobriety’s seemingly-impossible demands and the allure of death for those who feel they have transgressed beyond redemption. “Halfway House Diary” catalogs the tedious progression of time, where “every hour is a version of an hour/coming toward us.” Seeking his own rebirth, the speaker recalls “thick ropes of mosquitoes/swarming” down the nose of a dead cow and how its decaying flesh sank “drowning in the sound of rain.” Brewer rejects the apparent finality of the scene, however, preferring instead to regard it as “the meadow becoming two kingdoms at once,” just as the addict’s former self must die in order to permit health and hope to bloom. This resurrection theme blazes in the last dozen lines of “Detox Psalm,” where Brewer’s writing is taut, sonorous, and surreal:
I thought to give myself
to the dogs, but they only gnawed
my thighs. With the waves’ jade
coaxing, I heaved my every organ
through my mouth, then cut a mouth,
at last, in my abdomen and prayed
for there to be something more divine
than the body, and still something
more divine than that, for a torrent
of white flies to fly out of me,
anything, make me in the image
of the bullet, I begged, release me
from myself and I will end a life.
In these poems, West Virginia itself—impoverished, depleted, hardened— antagonizes its residents, and the landscape’s stark juxtapositions of beauty and barrenness, pride and poverty compel many to seek the fleeting escapism of drugs. Everywhere the reader turns there are wrecked mountains, ghostly machinery, and rusted vehicles. The book’s sprawling, cinematic opener, “Oxyana, West Virginia,” scans the ruinous terrain, including “Hog Hill where Massey Energy/dumped cinder, the gray waste/between breaths, poisoned trees/black like charred bones,/where we burned cars while girls/wrote our death dates on our palms/with their tongues.” “Daedalus in Oxyana” ventriloquizes the mythical father, who can no longer stand “the mountain’s hull/chewing out the corridors of coal” and ultimately surrenders to “scraping out my veins,/a trembling maze, a skein of blue.” “Appalachia, Your Genesis” is one of the book’s most surreal inclusions and contains a premature epitaph for the entire region: “Had you a head/you’d have a mouth/and moan the song of a cello played by flame.” One of the final poems in the book, “Today I Took You to Our Oxyana High School Reunion,” narrates a truly wrenching vignette, where two-thirds of a graduating class are dead, and “when a classmate walked up/and pointed at you/in the urn I cradled like an infant/said that motherfucker/stole forty bucks from me.”
Brewer’s writing isn’t flawless, however. “We Burn the Bull” sprints through an opaque account of friends torching an animal’s corpse, veering toward melodrama when the bull’s tongue becomes “some surrender flag” and the burners themselves seem “like earliest man bewitched by heat’s coil.” Even at seven pages, “Resolution” fails to establish a unified tone, and is full of flimsy lines (“I know this isn’t/a solution,” “I don’t need answers”) that make it read more like a gushy draft than a polished piece. Reminiscent of Marianne Moore with its unusual syntax and staccato rhythms, the self-conscious funkiness of “Ode to Suboxone” leads to some awkward phrasing (“I punctuate the minutes with much coffee”) and questionable metaphors (“my double-wide of debt,” “turning inside out/a precious jewel”).
Despite these concerns, 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. While our purgatorial political discourse fails to produce the imagination or courage necessary to combat the opioid epidemic, it is heartening to know such things can be found among our poetry.
You can reach reviews editor Adam Tavel at atavel@worwic.edu or @fawnabyss. Plume’s review policy can be found here.
Review: I Know Your Kind by William Brewer
Spencer Hupp
October 2017
Poet William Brewer’s first collection, I Know Your Kind, is set in Oceana, West Virginia, a little town so awash in prescription drug abuse that it’s been nicknamed “Oxyana.” Brewer is from there, and many of his poems deal with dramas of addiction, withdrawal, and overdose. It’d be easy for a poet to be pigeonholed by subject matter as readily sensationalized as this, but Brewer avoids melodrama in these earnest, confessional poems. The best ones aren’t about drugs so much as they use the processes of abuse as figures for the frequent failures and small triumphs of being human.
The collection is a mixed bag. Brewer’s enthusiasm for abstract images sometimes gets the better of him. “Origin of Silence” opens with a description of a “woodpile / trembling like a calendar of spirit.” The metaphor misses its mark: what exactly is a trembling woodpile? Woodpiles are as inert as they come. More baffling is that “calendar of spirit.” How could it tremble? The fumble is saved two lines later, though, by a powerful description of Appalachia in winter: “snuff-stained pastures, snow-woven dirt.” This second image is both comprehensible and musical. Brewer’s trouble with figurative language may be that it comes too easily. It can sometimes seem like he’s showing off. Thankfully, the good buttresses the bad. For every “steam engine of dementia” (“Sundowning”) and “memory of childhood / equated to a bomb” (“Icarus in Oxyana”) there are such strong images as “the absence of flesh / begetting the absence of light” (“Clean Days in Oxyana”), and “Times my simple son will shake me to / syringe still hanging like a feather from my arm” (“Daedalus in Oxyana”). These images—light, flesh, feathers, wings—come close to, but never fully achieve, cliché. They work best when they flirt with received tropes. In conflating a syringe with a feather, Brewer puts himself in contact with a long list of poets who’ve made addicts into angels. Sidestepping the grandiosity of previous addict-poets like Allen Ginsberg and his contemporaries, Brewer employs a subdued, realistic pathos. This poet is not one for hysterics. Other beatific imagery appears throughout the collection, again with mixed results. “Detox Psalm” falls short because it describes a prayer, while “Overdose Psalm” succeeds because it describes the illumination prayer brings: “. . . the column / of light breaking through the black woods / only a reminder of what once resisted it.” Brewer manages great lines even in weaker poems: “I knew the good news, that home / is an ancient American word / for theater,” for instance, from “The Good News.” There’s also a masterful five-poem run near the end of the collection, from “Letter in Response to a Letter From My Son” to “Explanation of Matter in Oxyana,” that would work even better as a long poem in five sections.
The book’s most enchanting poem is “Withdrawal Dream on the Cape.” Here it is in full:
It was the end of an era unharmed
The north sky still smelled heavy of slate
before they cauterized the fens the farms
at oyster bars we’d vaunt our weight
quit selling fountains none could afford
to keep their yachts named Emerald Vermillion
ghosts named for colors littered the seaboard
the tide came in each flag became a noose
I used to wash my apples in apple juice
I’m not sure what this poem means. It is, after all, a “dream,” and even Freud was willing to concede that some dreams don’t mean anything. Perhaps this poem hints rather than means. It is in part a vision of an impossible past in an impossible place; I don’t know of any capes in West Virginia, unless Oceana counts as a coastline, scattered with the wreckage of addiction. As dream logic dictates, the poem’s images are false and automatic, pulled from the disparate half-memories of a mind scrambled by drug abuse. Because its speaker is dreaming, the nostalgia evoked by the poem feels unsought, as if drifted upon unconsciously. This allows Brewer to reflect on memory without overindulging in sentiment. The poem is also a technical marvel, matching long vowel sounds to soft consonants, enacting the sound of waves, or the wavy delirium of opioid withdrawal. The poem’s close rhymes subvert the pattern of speech we associate with lullabies and nursery rhymes, repurposing it as an addict’s fever dream. Brewer’s rhyming “noose” with “juice” also reveals a caustic irony that many poets eschew in the interest of “sincerity.” This line of thinking is dangerous; if sharp language is insincere then poetry has been damned since Homer. I applaud Brewer for his opposition to such notions. He has a bite, and the language to make it lethal.
I Know Your Kind, Milkweed Editions, September 5, 2017. 2016 National Poetry Series Winner, selected by Ada Limón.