William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017) is a book concerned with the wreckage of opioid addiction, and the deceptive phenomenologies that are shaped by its hellfire. A thorough poetic investigation of the metaphysics of opioid addiction—its attendant euphoria, dysphoria, and withdrawal—requires a syntax capable of dilating time. The curious beauty of the heroin high is that it feels like it will last forever. Withdrawal, too, feels like it will last forever, which explains the bottomless terror that characterizes it. Addiction is a function of time.

“Withdrawal Dream Amongst Spring Acreage” is the first of three “withdrawal dreams” in Brewer’s debut poetry collection. Like all dreams, the poem feigns cohesion. It opens in such a way that we are given to believe a story is about to be told: “Here, on the last great ottoman / like all ottomans that once were” (28). But the poem never satisfies this expectation, at least not in a grammatically sound way; it merely piles up parentheticals that move us further and further away from (and/or more deeply into) the furniture. The speaker is nodding off, perhaps curled up on their parents’ living room floor, feeble and leaning on an ottoman whose fabric has a “patch of watermelons” for its pattern. However, I’d like to note that this state is not just the florid semiconsciousness of opioid intoxication but rather that of acute withdrawal syndrome.

It is famously impossible to sleep during the first few weeks of opioid withdrawal, but thankfully there are snatches of something approaching sleep, little half-dreams, dreamlets in which the user is temporarily unchained from their illness. Sometimes in these liminal zones the user will imagine the obtainment and ingestion of their drug of choice, and the brain, in turn, miraculously simulates wellness, sanity, satisfaction. The user’s eyelids might droop heavily in a strange parody of opioid intoxication, for they are simultaneously in a no-place and an every-place, an expanse not unlike the faded pattern of an old family ottoman, or a pastoral depicted in wallpaper, the bucolic tableau repeating and leading back into itself endlessly, a place where the user is “once and always baffled” by an ever-extending oneiric grammar.

It gets weirder. In Brewer’s scene, apparently the watermelons are “a violet once green, // and before were gold…” Watermelon blossoms, in case you haven’t seen them, are a golden yellow, and the rind of the melon is a striped green. The development of this unwieldy fruit, then, is recounted for us in reverse. Except something is not quite right here. The fruit's flesh, here in the present, is not the trademark ruby red—it is “violet,” livid and garish to the eye. The exposed innards of the watermelon are disquieting because they are of a hue that is unexpected, but not so far from the expected as to be unfamiliar. The color of the fruit is uncanny, the same way an ultramarine sky is uncanny. Begotten auspiciously in gold, the flowering addiction bears fruits that are somehow wrong.

Above the golden watermelon blossoms of the past, we learn, is a “stirred air / I stir now…” Whatever volition set this process in motion is enacted by the speaker in the present. History is habit-forming; it collapses into the present. The once-prosperous Ottoman Empire declined and dissolved, but empire has a way of repeating itself—like wallpaper. This last great ottoman, sigil of a fading childhood domicile against which the exhausted speaker has collapsed, is not actually the last, and certainly not the first, site of decline and dissolution. The speaker has been here before, and will likely be here again. There will be more watermelons next spring.

But “I stir now” also signifies waking, and in isolation these three words comprise a complete sentence that is rendered in active voice and the present tense. Buttressed by the enjambment, this formulation communicates a kind of jump cut, a reset by which “I” is now the instigating actor, the subject of this one-sentence poem in which a subject never actually emerges. “I stir now” opens the text up to a secondary reading in which the speaker wakes up in the middle of the poem, the middle of a withdrawal dream, enmeshed in the gold-green tangle of a watermelon patch that is now inexplicably purple. But because withdrawal is a sleepless endeavor, the speaker is actually only waking from wakefulness itself, from a waking dream, and this onerous fact is confirmed in the following line when we learn that “a rumor of sleep [has] stampede[d] through now and its disappearance…” The addict in withdrawal only thinks they have fallen asleep. The withdrawal dream is a simulacrum of dreaming, the mind’s translucent attempt to construct a semblance of restful narrative. There is no enduring shelter of substance in opioid withdrawal. All is temporary, even the “now” that visits the addict when they are thrust from wakefulness back into wakefulness. Merciful and merciless, now has a way of disappearing.

And even the vanishment of the now turns out to have vanished, to have been impossible from the beginning, for the present “too [is] a rumor…” The poet demonstrates, through the fogged and fractaled cognition of an addict in withdrawal, that any notion of a singular stable moment, through which time is actuated and perceived, is nothing more than speculation. That there is a beginning and a middle and an end is hearsay. Complicating things is the fact that this rumored present—and/or perhaps the quality of its rumorment—is “outstretched and absolute…” The dreamed hologram of the present is extensible, unlimited, entire and fixed. Our powers of speculation are both endless and endlessly limited.

Also “outstretched and absolute” is the final image of the poem: “this ladder / someone will climb down once I'm gone.” The speaker is not yet gone, is still here, presumably at the lower terminus of a ladder, as though in their diseased trance they have climbed down into a viewing chamber or a submarine. And this is not just any ladder; this is “this ladder,” a ladder that the speaker has chosen to show us, in an act which implicates us in time and space: here, now, right alongside the speaker (italics mine).

The poem, too, is a ladder—a ladder of five couplets, five rungs that the writer has constructed and that the reader has faithfully followed the writer down, only to find that the writer has disappeared and left the speaker in his place. “Withdrawal Dream Amongst Spring Acreage” is remarkable because it provokes an intense and claustrophobic encounter between reader and speaker. The writer strands them both in the basement of the poem, troubled by the knowledge that they will one day both be gone.

The basement of the poem, the white space that engulfs page twenty-eight of I Know Your Kind, is dopesickness, and dopesickness is a zone, a place visitable in both the “present” and in memory, in the world and in art, and even if this addicted speaker is able to restore themselves through treatment, therapy, sobriety, the zone will persist, and past and future addicts will descend the ladder that leads to it, will haunt its acreage, just as the acreage will haunt every addict who has seen it, be they recovered, alive, sick, dead, or vanished. 




Works Cited

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Brewer, William. “Withdrawal Dream amongst Spring Acreage.” I Know Your Kind. Minnealopis: Milkweed Editions, 2017. 28.