Places I've Taken My Body

Starred review from April 1, 2020
A disabled woman's memoir, "so storybook that if I hadn't lived it I would swear I made it up." In her first collection of prose, Brown, a poet and writing instructor at Kenyon College, eloquently, often wittily describes a mostly wheelchair-bound life lived with pain and the places, emotional and physical, to which she has traveled. The author's mother had premature identical twins. Frances died less than two days later, and Brown was stricken with cerebral palsy. As she writes, she "came into the world blue and tiny and sparring for my place in it. Two pounds, with my fists up." Memories of her dead sister haunt every page of this powerful book, as does the ominous ticking of her lifetime survival-rate clock. During childhood, Brown could walk some, haltingly, even jump a bit. There were early years of physical therapy, and her tendons were often lengthened. She had "stints in plaster casts and full-length braces that locked my legs in place with a huge metal hinge" that would cause her legs to chafe and bleed. As the author grew into her "perplexing and unstable body," she also had to overcome neurological damage that affected her "ability to process numbers, space and patterns." In 2017, she wrote an award-winning book of poetry about women who were confined to a hospital for epileptics and the "feebleminded" in her home state of Virginia. The author chronicles how in Bologna, Italy, she had difficulty exploring the city, as many places were wheelchair inaccessible, and she visited the Anatomical Theater of the Archiginnasio, a place where she felt there was "some filament--fine and strong as fishing line--stretched from a hook in [my] cheek all the way to [the] ground." In one essay, the author honestly discusses sex as "a woman who can stumble, hurt, and want, and--yes--be wanted." Brown is a writer to watch. Heartfelt and wrenching, a significant addition to the literature of disability. (first printing of 7,500 copies)

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April 6, 2020
Poet Brown (The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded) explores living with cerebral palsy in her fine prose debut. Brown contrasts the limitations that readers might expect her condition, classed by the medical establishment as a “movement disorder,” to impose on her life, by showing it has actually been characterized by mobility, not stasis, recounting her travels throughout the U.S. and the world. In “Something’s Wrong with Me,” she writes that she’s “so tired of talking about disability” and “about my body and other people’s bodies.” Occasionally, the sentiments ring overly familiar, as when Brown reflects, in “Calling Long Distance,” on the division between the body and the self: “There was my damaged body, and then there was the rest of me.” However, Brown mostly overcomes the potential for overwrought sentimentality, due to her careful and exacting use of language. “Chronic pain makes you good at abandoning yourself,” she explains in “The Broken Country: On Disability and Desire,” a candid discussion of sexuality. Brown’s work leaves readers with a lyrical look at living within the confines of the body. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

Starred review from May 15, 2020
In this collection of searing and ineffable essays, poet Brown describes in gorgeous prose her lifelong struggle with cerebral palsy, which has confined her to a wheelchair. At times painful to read, it is equally difficult to put down. The reader feels Brown's anguish but also appreciates fleeting moments of beauty. Despite her physical challenges, Brown continues to travel the world, from Bologna to London, earning fellowships, giving presentations, and accepting invitations to read at colleges and conferences. Constant motion camouflages the extent to which I'm alien even to myself, she says. The essays are enlightening on so many levels as she describes situations many of us take for granted, including something as simple as attending a cocktail party when you can't stand or needing to know ahead of time if there is an elevator in the building where you plan to teach. There is so much she wants to see, so much she wants to do, and yet, so much of it is unreachable to me. But she persists. Particular themes stand out: home and dislocation, the physical body and the spiritual mind, rage and acceptance, belonging and identity, loneliness and fraternity, and writing as an act of creation. Brown's essays can feel like a punch in the gut, but they are beautiful, nevertheless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 5, 2020

Poet essayist Brown (The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded) writes candidly about her physical and emotional struggles with cerebral palsy in this collection of deeply personal essays. Moving restlessly through a world designed for the able-bodied to achieve independence and literary success, Brown chronicles everything from navigating inaccessible buildings to coping with chronic, unacknowledged grief--both for a lost twin sister and for a different body--which manifests into issues of anger and trust. Musing on the experiences that shape self-identity, Brown explores her relationship with her body through encounters with places--an abandoned house, an anatomical theater, a historical center for the disabled--and locates, in literary works and the complex rituals of faith, guideposts for her own journey. There is much to admire in the beauty of Brown's language and the honesty of her pain, despite the relentless introspection of the essays that often kept this reader at an emotional distance. VERDICT Anyone who has faced physical challenges is sure to find wisdom in Brown's words as well as the universal truths she shares.--Sara Shreve, Newton, KS

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