Author(s): Molly McCully Brown

Essay

This metaphysical, intimate and visceral essay collection is stunning in its insight and suffused with optimism - Molly McCully Brown is the Rebecca Solnit of the 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.

Review: 'These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our own interior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much grace and gratitude as we can muster.' - Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize winning author of AMITY & PROSPERITY

'Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveler, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world.' - Claire Dederer

Author Biography: 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.