Places I've Taken My Body: Essays
Molly McCully Brown
(Author)
Description
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.
Product Details
Price
$24.95
$23.20
Publisher
Persea Books
Publish Date
June 02, 2020
Dimensions
5.3 X 6.7 X 0.9 inches | 0.7 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780892555130
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About the Author
Molly McCully Brown received her MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is a graduate of Stanford University and Simon's Rock of Bard College. She has published poems in Gulf Coast, Image, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere; Her Essay "The Broken Country" from Places I've Taken My Body was pick for the Best American Essays of 2021 publication (HMH Books).
Reviews
I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know. Writing from the locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, Molly McCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience -- desire, loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory -- with lyric compression and expansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get out and do something with my own body -- kneel at an altar and recite the Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop and shout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these are urgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive inside our own bodies, wherever we take them.--Jamie Quatro, author of "Fire Sermon" and "I Want to Show You More"
These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our own interior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much grace and gratitude as we can muster.--Eliza Griswold, author of "Amity & Prosperity," winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Brown eloquently, often wittily describes a mostly wheelchair-bound life lived with pain and the places, emotional and physical, to which she has traveled. [Her identical twin] Frances died [in] less than two days . . . and Brown was stricken with cerebral palsy. . . . Memories of her dead sister haunt every page of this powerful book, as does the ominous ticking of her lifetime survival-rate clock. . . .Brown is a writer to watch. . . .Heartfelt and wrenching.
These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our own interior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much grace and gratitude as we can muster.--Eliza Griswold, author of "Amity & Prosperity," winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Brown eloquently, often wittily describes a mostly wheelchair-bound life lived with pain and the places, emotional and physical, to which she has traveled. [Her identical twin] Frances died [in] less than two days . . . and Brown was stricken with cerebral palsy. . . . Memories of her dead sister haunt every page of this powerful book, as does the ominous ticking of her lifetime survival-rate clock. . . .Brown is a writer to watch. . . .Heartfelt and wrenching.
