In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living
within and beyond the limits of a body--in her case, one shaped since
birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement
disorder. In spite of--indeed, in response to--physical 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 Shelley's Frankenstein and
the world's oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement,
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.
