I Know Your Kind

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limon, “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.

He shows us the high, at once numbing and transcendent: "this warm moment when I forget which part of me / I blamed." He shows us the overdose, when "the poppies on my arms / bruised red petals." And he shows us the mourner, attending his high school reunion: "I guess we were underdressed: / me in my surf shoes / you in an urn."

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.