Molly McCully Brown

"In sixteen 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...

"These poems explore the haunted legacy of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, an medical institution at the heart of the eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century in America. The author, who has cerebral palsy, grew up in the shadow of the former Colony in southwestern Virginia, aware that, had she been born fifty years earlier, she would quite possibly been admitted there, and exposed to a variety of inhumane...