I know your kind Poems

Review by Booklist Review

Brewer quotes Rumi Grief can be the garden of compassion and his work fits well the Persian poet's words. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2015, well over 30,000 deaths were attributed to opioid misuse. This report further states that 12.5 million people misused prescription opioids that same year. Brewer's achingly beautiful collection is a sober and resonant reckoning with those official statistics and ongoing tragedy. Brewer explains that the word Oxyana refers to Oceana, West Virginia, after it became a capital of OxyContin abuse. Oxyana is a recurring image, a touchstone and a guide through a devastated landscape as Brewer commiserates with its afflicted inhabitants. In Leaving the Pain Clinic, he writes, Always this warm moment when I forget which part of me I blamed. Finishing with the lines I throw it open for all to see how daylight, so tall, has imagination. It has heart. It loves, I Know Your Kind is a garden of mercy tended by a very skilled poet.--Niño, Raúl Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Brewer descends the rabbit hole of opioid addiction and its cycles of despair in his penetrating debut. He covers the gamut of experiences from withdrawal to rehab to relapse, and the idle helplessness of watching friends and family succumb to the disease. Brewer's expert descriptions of his hometown of Oceana, W.Va., (nicknamed "Oxyana" for the drug whose use has spread there) evoke a sinister, deathly presence, with "fog-strangled mornings" and "rain choking the throats of smokestacks," a landscape Brewer penetratingly connects to the addict's brain. "Smog from the steam engine/ of dementia tints your hair," Brewer writes, "your synapses scatter// in the late December forest of your mind." The stunning and spare "Resolution" captures the decisive moment of choosing sobriety, its pathos and clarity so strong it is compared to the invention of the window, "All that light bursting in." Brewer's creative syntax and line breaks bolster his dark and vivid imagery, especially in a few downright unforgettable instances. "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. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Brewer opens this pointedly forthright debut collection with an epigraph explaining that the town of Oceana, WV, was nicknamed Oxyana for its high incidence of OxyContin abuse, and the name surfaces throughout this chronicle of addiction and social consequence. "Bars, pool halls,/ neighbors turn me away, but not churches" says one speaker unpityingly (he's actually looking for air conditioning) and, after an overdose, "Oblivion is liberating." Elsewhere, a brother shuts the door on a user ("You can't come here anymore, not like this") and a man comes to after being mugged by an addict with rain in his face "clear as gin." The tragedy keeps coming-the epigraph further explains that heroin has replaced OxyContin as the drug of choice, with West Virginia now claiming the highest fatal overdose rate in America. But the tone is less cri de coeur than calm, determined observation. VERDICT Though occasionally one wants more edge, this is a thoughtful collection that can be approached by all readers. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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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. Excerpted from I Know Your Kind: Poems by William Brewer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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