Places I've Taken My Body: Essays [Paperback]

In this uncommonly wonderful collection of essays (A Browneloquently, often wittily describes a mostly wheelchair-bound lifelived with pain and the places, emotional and physical, to which she hastraveled. [Her identical twin] Frances died [in] less than twodays . . . and Brown was stricken with cerebral palsy. . . . Memories ofher dead sister haunt every page of this powerful book, as does theominous ticking of her lifetime survival-rate clock. . . .Brown is awriter to watch. . . .Heartfelt and wrenching. Poet Brown ( ...searing and ineffable... Brown's essays can feel like a punch in the gut, but they are beautiful, nevertheless. Iwant to press this book into the hands of everyone I know. Writing fromthe locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, MollyMcCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience  desire,loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory  with lyric compression andexpansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get outand?do something?with my own body? kneel at an altar and recitethe Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop andshout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these areurgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive insideour own bodies, wherever we take them. These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our owninterior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much graceand gratitude as we can muster.