Published in 2020
215 pages
Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017) winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us (2020). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tin House, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and The New York Times. She teaches at Kenyon College.
What is this book about?
In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of—indeed, in response to—physical constraints, Brown leads a peripatetic life: the essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the world’s oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human—flawed, potent, feeling.
