Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020

In this “uncommonly wonderful collection of essays” (Rain Taxi), Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—one shaped since birth by cere- bral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder Throughout the book (which now includes an essay on Seamus Heaney, Notre Dame, and the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic), 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.

“Places I’ve Taken My Body will strike chords in anyone who’s ever questioned their faith, been challenged by their body, or who has ever been vulnerable—which is to say, all of us.” —Jaime Herndon, Foreword Reviews

“Without a trace of self-pity, Places I’ve Taken My Body accomplishes what literature does best: it allows readers an opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes.”—Mia Levitin, Times Literary Supplement

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and, with Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us. She teaches in the MFA program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-538-3 / 232 pages / Essays