Places I've Taken My Body Paperback by Molly McCully Brown

Product Details

• Publisher: Persea Books (2021-09-28)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 215 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780892555130
• Item Weight: 238.14 grams
• Dimensions: 17.81 x 13.94 x 1.55 cm

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.

About the Author

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body—published in the United States in 2020 by Persea Books and in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020), an NEA Big Read selection. Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review,  The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: the University of the South, and Editor-in-Chief of Image Journal.