G1217 Places I've taken my body; Essays

General Information:

Name of Book: Places I['ve Taken My Body; Essays

ISBN: 978-0-89255-513-0

Publisher: Persea

Year it was published: 2020

Summary:

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.

Author: Molly McCully Brown 

About the Author:
(From the book)

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the acclaimed poetry collection THE VIRGINIA STATE COLONY FOR EPILEPTICS AND FEEBLEMINDED, which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was anmed a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is coauthor of a second poetry collection, IN THE FIELD BETWEEN US. Brown has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a United Staets Artists Fellowhship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Wrtiers Felowship from the Oxford American magazine. Originally from southwestern Virginia, she currently lives in Gambier, Ohio and teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Kenyon Review Fellow in Poetry. 

1. Muscle memory 

2. In smoke and exhaustion

3. If you are permanently lost 

4. Bent body, lamb

5. What we are

6. Narrative and need 

7. The skin you're in 

8. Somethings wrong with me 

9. The Virginia State colony for epileptics and feebleminded 

10. Calling long distance 

11. Poetry, patience and prayer 

12. The broken country on disability and desire 

13. The cost of certainty 

14. Public anatomy 

15. A brief litany of forgettings 

16. Fragments, never sent 

17. Frankenstein abroad 

Opinion:

I glimpse the world through "normal" perfectly able eyes. I can trust that the bus arriving will be the one I can get on. I can trust that I don't have to maneuver through angles or make sure that wheel chair won't fall. Not all have that luxury however. In these essays, the author, Molly McCully Brown dares to open up her complex world of cerebral palsy and the toll it has taken over her body, and it's a world all need to see and experience, if at least to come to understanding about life and how much we need stability to survive and thrive. It's a world that I didn't understand at first and that gave me an appreciation and understanding on the strength of life and a world that will long linger once the last page is turned. 

This was given for review 

4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)