William Brewer

Red Arrow

"This work quakes and blooms and dares us to try to resist the world's grace."-Ada Limón

Poems

I Know Your Kind

A brilliant, utterly contemporary debut novel about a ghostwriter in search of his subject—a famous physicist who has vanished—only to discover their lives align perfectly within the riddles of time and space. When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife—a successful A.I. designer—and is haunted by an overwhelming dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: the physicist disappears, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity. Desperate for relief, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and emerges to find his world transformed: joy suffuses every moment. His opportunities are endless. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context and feels he might finally know how to reclaim his past and future alike. Moving swiftly across time and geography—from a chemical spill in West Virginia, to psychedelic therapy in California, to a frecciarossa racing across the Italian countryside—The Red Arrow is a spiraling, spellbinding, and often comedic journey through art, memory, and the contradicting layers that compose the self.

A novel

The Red Arrow

'It was a strange time. He felt like he was happy. It was strange because it wasn't so long ago that he was convinced the only way out of the depression that had crippled him since he was a child, was death.' But now, he is on a high-speed train travelling from Rome to Modena, a failed novelist on the tail of a famous physicist whose memoir he is ghostwriting. The more of another man's life he writes, the more his debt to his publisher is paid off. But nothing would be possible, not the journey, not the writing, not his beautiful wife who is waiting for him at the hotel, had he not experienced the life-altering, life-saving treatment for the darkness which had been hovering since the chemical spill in West Virginia. As the narrator untangles the past in his bid to rewrite the future, he spirals across time, exploring memory, our sense of self and the ways we are connected. A devastating insight into depression, it's also a mind-expanding, exhilarating experience of the power of psychedelic therapy to transform a life.

When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: Plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife—a successful AI designer—and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity. Desperate for relief, the young writer undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed: Joy suffuses every moment. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context, and feels his life shift, refract, and crack open to reveal his past and future alike. Moving swiftly from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from a Brooklyn art studio to a high-speed train racing across the Italian countryside, The Red Arrow wades into the shadowy depths of the human psyche only to emerge, as if speeding through a mile-long tunnel, into a world that is so bright and wondrous, it almost feels completely new.

“An eye-opening and haunting journey into the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia—the constantly-chased highs . . . the devastating overdoses.” —Bustle Selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, 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. 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. “His vivid poems tell the story of the opioid epidemic from different voices and depict the sense of bewilderment people find themselves in as addiction creeps into their lives.” —PBS NewsHour “There’s these incredibly dreamy, mythic images . . . of people stumbling, of people hoping, of people losing each other. I love this book because it brought us into such empathy and compassion and tenderness towards this suffering.” —NPR “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis . . . Brewer sums up this new world.” —New York Magazine “May be one of this year’s most important books of verse since its brutal music confronts the taboos of addiction while simultaneously offering hope for overcoming them.” —Plume

William Brewer

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