I Know Your Kind: Poems (National Poetry Series) - Softcover

Brewer, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571314954 ISBN 13: 9781571314956

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

William Brewer is the author of Oxyana, which was awarded a Poetry Society of America National 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1571314954
• ISBN 13: 9781571314956
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96