I Know Your Kind

“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.”

“Brewer’s collection is a prime example for what can be accomplished when a poetical praxis is used to implement large and tricky-to-wield questions, particularly by moving outward to thoroughly probe an epidemic as it effects a state, a region, a people—as well as the individual. It holds our gazes to the underbelly and shows us that here, too, the imagination thrives and, like all undeniable art, is written in spite of all the things that work to silence it.”

“Balancing difficult material with refined style, I Know Your Kind gives voice to a submerged perspective and creates a startling experience … in a way that statistics, figures, and journalism cannot… . his lines have an ability to set and to shift like striated sediments on a cliff face.”

“I Know Your Kind will take you on an eye-opening and haunting journey into the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia—the constantly-chased highs, the crippling lows, the devastating overdoses, and the lives that the American healthcare debate doesn’t even come close to considering.”

“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. William Brewer is an immensely gifted poet. I Know Your Kind is a commanding debut.”

“With urgency but impeccably composed, harrowing but determinedly non-sensationalistic, William Brewer’s powerful and profound debut I Know Your Kind emphasizes the cycle of disillusion and loss that America’s worsening opioid epidemic both begets and feeds on. These poems seek out understanding but refuse false hope; the currents that compel them are ancient, cold, and strong; and what saves them from despair is what will keep readers returning to them for a long time to come—namely, the sheer forcefulness and vitality of Brewer’s expression.”

“‘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.”