Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

Praise for Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

Brown
eloquently, often wittily describes a mostly wheelchair-bound life
lived with pain and the places, emotional and physical, to which she has
traveled. [Her identical twin] Frances died [in] less than two
days . . . and Brown was stricken with cerebral palsy. . . . Memories of
her dead sister haunt every page of this powerful book, as does the
ominous ticking of her lifetime survival-rate clock. . . .Brown is a
writer to watch. . . .Heartfelt and wrenching.
— Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

Poet Brown (The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded) explores living with cerebral palsy in her fine prose debut … Brown’s work leaves readers with a lyrical look at living within the confines of the body.

— Publishers Weekly

...searing and ineffable... Brown's essays can feel like a punch in the gut, but they are beautiful, nevertheless.
— Booklist (Starred)

I
want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know. Writing from
the locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, Molly
McCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience — desire,
loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory — with lyric compression and
expansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get out
and do something with my own body — kneel at an altar and recite
the Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop and
shout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these are
urgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive inside
our own bodies, wherever we take them.
— Jamie Quatro, author of "Fire Sermon" and "I Want to Show You More"

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, author of "Amity & Prosperity," winner of the Pulitzer Prize