num_pages: 215
description: In seventeen intimate essays poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a bodyin her case one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite ofindeed in response tophysical 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 Shelleys Frankenstein and the worlds oldest anatomical theater the American Eugenics movement and Jerry Falwells Liberty University. Throughout Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences woven together in consideration always of what it means to be humanflawed potent feeling.
language: English
title: Places I've Taken My Body: Essays
publisher: Persea