PLACES I'VE TAKEN MY BODY

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.