Molly McCully Brown
“The best poems, I think, are acts of discovery, and we never discover anything if we aren’t willing to wander toward what seems difficult, or unknown, or fraught, or tangled, the edges of the map where there might be dragons. And what’s waiting over the edge of the map is different not just for every person, but for the versions of yourself you are from one year, or day, or minute to the next.”
“I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know. Writing from the locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, Molly McCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience ― desire, loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory ― with lyric compression and expansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get out and do something with my own body ― kneel at an altar and recite the Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop and shout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these are urgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive inside our own bodies, wherever we take them.”
“This is one of the most unexpected and inspiring poetic collaborations in recent years, wherein disability becomes something much larger than what the mainstream publishing culture usually imposes on it. From shared pain and loss arises a longing for connectivity with each other, with the natural world, and with speech itself. The poets’ desire for communion, expressed in dazzling lyrical language, wins me over. This is a beautiful, urgent book.”
“Molly McCully Brown’s first book of poems, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It arrives as if clutching a spray of dead flowers. It is beautiful and devastating.”
“This is nothing less than a revelatory debut that reveals how to stitch something undeniably beautiful out of immense pain and solitude.”
Molly McCully Brown’s most recent books are Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020), an essay collection Kirkus Review, in a starred review, called “powerful,” and In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020) a poetry collection co-authored with Susannah Nevison. She is also the author of the poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, praised its “rich imagery,” and the “humbling and heartbreaking” poems.
Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Crazyhorse, The New York Times, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and elsewhere.
As an accomplished writer of both poetry and essays, Brown was asked by The Adroit Journal about the difference between the two: “I think, for me, the difference between writing poetry and prose is less a question of wanting to express different ideas or experiences than a question of wanting to express ideas or experiences differently. That is to say, it’s more a matter of scope and angle then of content. A poem is like a pressure cooker, and I think I will always be most in love with the little worlds that their necessary compression and lyricism produces. A poem is somehow always both whole and fragmentary, and something about that feels like my first language. But I write essays when I want a little more breathing room, a little more space to unpack something, to provide context, to make digressions, and tell stories, and work my way from my usual essential uncertainty toward solid ground. There’s a lot of overlap between my prose and my poems, and I like to think they’re always to talking to each other. I’m so grateful to be able to write—and read—both.”
Raised in rural Virginia, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Stanford University, and the University of Mississippi, where she received her MFA. She lives in Norfolk, VA and teaches at Old Dominion University, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Nonfiction, and a member of the MFA Core Faculty.
Open and right-click to download
