Places I've taken my body : essays

Author

Molly McCully Brown

Call Number

• 921 B8799 (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York, New York : Persea Books, [2020]

Physical Description

215 pages ; 19 cm

Summary

"In sixteen 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"--

Notes

"A Karen & Michael Braziller Book" -- Title page.

Contents

• Muscle memory
• In smoke and exhaustion
• If you are permanently lost
• Bent body, lamb
• What we are
• Narrative and need
• The skin you're in
• Something's wrong with me
• The Virginia State Colony for epileptics and feebleminded
• Calling long distance
• Poetry, patience, and prayer
• The broken country: on disability and desire
• The cost of certainity
• Public anatomy
• A brief litany of forgettings
• Fragments, never sent
• Frankenstein abroad.