Places I've Taken My Body

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, Eugenics, 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.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of 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 also the co-author of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020.) Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her essay collection, Places I've Taken My Body, was published in 2021.