I Know Your Kind by William Brewer

Abstract

Reviewed by: I Know Your Kind by William Brewer Tyler Robert Sheldon William Brewer. I Know Your Kind. Milkweed Editions, 2017. William Brewer's potent new poetry collection I Know Your Kind, winner of the National Poetry Series, hinges on both tragedy and recovery. Chronicling a state and city close to its author's heart, this new work centers on the opioid crisis sweeping West Virginia and provides glass-sharp profiles of "Oxyana" and its people. As the drug ravages narrator and supporting characters alike, Brewer also chronicles poverty, recovery, relapse, and the complex relationships forged through phases of opioid addiction. Brewer introduces readers to Oxyana, a nickname given to Oceana, West Virginia. This city, at one point a "capital of OxyContin abuse," lends the state its dubious distinction of highest overdose rate in America—and lends Brewer glimpses of poverty, tatters, and vicarious glamor. Tourists blow in "to take pictures," and he sees with some dismay "Women in silk dresses / picking our apples, posing, / holding our bushel baskets // with a tenderness we've never known." By contrast, the people of Oxyana are more resilient than glamorous. Brewer's narrator, and those the narrator encounters, often float dangerously close to the sun. "Someone on the porch / who's lost both his arms / chain smokes," the speaker observes. "A memory of childhood / equated to a bomb." Right away we learn that the narrator isn't exempt from these hellish moments. In "To the Addict Who Mugged Me," he debates a hierarchy of brutality: "A never-ending dial tone / chewing the receptors in your brain, / or waking up with a busted face, // teeth red and penny-sweet." The narrator contemplates the faceless thug who's worked him over: "with your stamp bag of winter, / your entire universe boiling / in the breast of a spoon, // I wish I felt it in me to wish you well." Empathetic or not, the speaker perpetrates his own ruinous actions. In "Daedalus in Oxyana," he brings another individual close to that deadly sun: 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. Already courting danger himself, the narrator feels the weight of his decision when his son responds all too well: "You'd think // the sun had gotten inside his head, / the way he smiled." The world for him is never the same. Harsher still are moments the speaker realizes will never occur. Though the mind can recover, perhaps the soul cannot, as in "Naloxone," where the narrator cannot catch his breath: "Do you hear that? All the things / I meant to do are burnt spoons // hanging from the porch like chimes. / Do you have some wind? Just a hit," he pleads, knowing the path to recovery but slow to find it. In the throes of addiction, he begins to embody his addiction in a literal way: "As they brought me back, / they said, the poppies on my arms / bruised red petals." And even recovery, for its short duration, cannot always [End Page 22] bring any type of closure. "Leaving the Pain Clinic" shows an inherent confusion in addiction: "though the door's the same, / somehow the exit, like the worst wounds, is greater / than the entrance was." Recovery, whether the narrator's own or by those around him, sometimes leaves a distorted world for the speaker. The poem "Origin of Silence" reveals that even still moments are alien. He witnesses another close moment of crucial tragedy: "my brother, / … like a grasshopper, / shed a thin, amber husk of his suffering," he confides, and though the brother comes back to himself at length, he leaves "the wind / holding its tongue, a silence so entire / I thought all the crickets hanged themselves." All corners of Oxyana, the speaker shows, hold the potential for tragedy—even when none has yet arisen. Eventually the speaker embraces his own complicity in the jagged world he inhabits. "Withdrawal Dream with Feather and Knife" shows his gradual resistance and creeping acceptance through apt metaphor: "In its steel-strong beak, the bird / took the knife and stabbed my...