I Know Your Kind: Poems

By William Brewer and Ada Limón

“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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781571319685

Book preview

OXYANA, WEST VIRGINIA

None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

the fog-strangled mornings of March,

cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks,

the pink heads of rhododendrons

lopped off by the wind.

We wrestled earth with alchemy,

turned creek beds into wineglasses

the Roosevelts used at state dinners,

fueled fires hot as the sun’s dreams.

And there was light: a mile deep

in the underworld mines,

beaming from our foreheads

like wings through dust.

Not even the days we called beautiful.

Autumn weekends when DC drove in

to take pictures. Women in silk dresses

picking our apples, posing,

holding our bushel baskets

with a tenderness we’ve never known.

Snow days, belly-crawling

onto the frozen lake

to hear the ice recite the Iliad.

Not 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—even now,

rain choking the throats of smokestacks,

the river a vein of rust and trash.

Have you ever seen so many cold faces

slapped in the afternoon?

So many voices screaming— Wake up.

This is beyond desire.

This is looking through a hole

in the wall around