In the Field Between Us is a friendship in poems, an epistolary project by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison that ponders disability and the possibility of belonging in the aftermath of lifelong medical intervention. In the beginning, the poem-letters express, in gorgeous harmony, the psychic and physiological complexities of surviving remedy. As the book unfolds, the writers encounter a natural world around them that increasingly seems to mirror the traumas they have endured. Out of its tracing of innumerable scars, this book emits a perseverance, a spirit of communion, and a hopeful resolve that rises out of the poets’ attention to detail and their profound connection to one another.
. . . what would you weather just to call yourself alive?
I have a new favorite poet, and she's. . . alive.
Alive! A living poet. . . whom I love. Imagine that!
Her name is Molly McCully Brown and I first discovered her work in her debut poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which is quite possibly the most astounding new poetry I have encountered in decades.
This poet moves me. She breaks me, actually. And, that's an interesting choice of words. Ms. Brown was born with a “broken” body, and her “flaws” are visible. But what about all of the other flaws, the ones we all possess, but no one can actually see? Oh, she writes with transparency about ALL the flaws, y'alls.
And I can't mention my new favorite poet without hinting that I might, in fact, have TWO new favorite poets. This collection is a “conversation,” back and forth, between two poets, two writers with profound physical differences, the other being Susannah Nevison, who was previously unknown to me. Her poems stand out just as boldly and beautifully as Ms. Brown's do here. So, maybe two new favorites? (Shivers!).
Um. . . wow? Wowzers, wowza, wow.
It snows in this strange city. I'm bewildered by the white, the way it makes one perfect creature of the place, one body built up soundless overnight, then blown to pieces by the wind, and how I barrel into it—my body as unstable here as anywhere. I distrust the weather in my body—there's a sudden, shallow warmth before tornadoes whistle damage down—before my body had these seams there had to be a shattering I don't remember, you'd have had to turn your face away from all the shards.
written in collaboration, these epistle poems written back & forth between two disabled writers, molly mccully brown & susannah nevison - in the field between us considers disability and the possibility of belonging in the aftermath of lifelong medical intervention.
UGHHHHH this is absolutely beautiful, i cant express how i love this so much. im so glad to come across this book after picking up molly mccully brown's the virginia state colony for epileptics and feebleminded not too long ago which is one of the best poetry collections i have read. its my first time hearing about susannah nevison and i just cant believe how im just discovering these amazing poets only just recently???
as i was reading, i could really feel how difficult it must have been to write these poems out but at the same time, i also cant help but to really admire their braveness in doing so - out of all the traumas they have endured & their tracing of innummerable scars, these poems emit a perseverance, a spirit of communion and a hopeful resolve that rise out of the poets' profound connection to one another.
i cant believe how underrated their poetry are, i really highly recommend if youre into poetry in the first place and searching for a powerful & brilliant collection to read. IM ALREADY A FAN!!!
I keep a lot of lanterns in the house for the ways we might one day be able to get lost, a lot of matches so my smaller selves can light their way along the road. They get distracted, drop them lit, a pasture burns: tobacco, strawberries, our skin comes right off with the plaster. They seem surprised, sometimes, by all the damage, other times they're just in love with how the light takes over for awhile. S, you're right, we're all they know. I send them up the road, they trail a blaze right home to climb back down the throat they came from, hungry, tired from the show, and ill-equipped to make it on their own. Who'd have thought it, that anybody's country was in our bones?
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a generous, expansive poetics of disability that is also a poetics of communion. thanks aqilah for a gorgeous rec!
It is possible our maker knows we are makerless. What can we do? Pair up, perhaps. Read outwardly, together, this In The Field Between Us, placed so mortally within by poets Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison. Look, I have wanted to write you. But instead I cup my hands by holding this book while elsewhere I clay and call inside its impression of response. Oh body, with your origin stories for mirrors. Oh eye, with your cut of arrival’s winnings. I was wrong to think correspondence would turn one lonely. Here, in a verse predating what is both former and latter, are two as two bringing transport to a standstill. Should I go on? Can I? How pure and wrecked can language be? I can’t say, but start here. There are tools used in this work that don’t exist. I needn’t be whole, but am by them, fixed.
A collection of poems written as letter back and forth between two poets. Themes of disability, the body, survival, friendship, and illness.
from Dear S—: "Half the nights / I don't know my body when I wake to it, / and there's grief in the returning, remembering / pain, familiar as a fist I know. In the morning, / I wake and my body wears bruises I didn't make, / or don't remember making."
from Dear M—: "I've turned off all the lights, / closed every door, but the littler / selves come tumbling out no matter / what I do: they tug at the hem / of my dress, until I stop and say / their names."
from Dear Maker: "Most stories lack magic: your lungs are too small, / so you can't breathe, so you don't breathe,, . so you die. Or almost die, and then / there's just a life, full of a lot of things that / have no place in myth: scalpel and stitches / and too many dishes in the kitchen sink."
These poems! These poems! These letters between friends, lifelines and love notes, these acts of witness and rage. Every line in these pages guts me and sews me together again. “When I open / my hands, I’m never surprised by the birds they turn into” writes Nevison in one of the collection’s “Dear M—” poems. And Brown writes back, “Dear S— / The birds our hands become / are the ones with holes cut / in their cores so you can see / right through them to the world / they’re leaving toward…” Page after page, this book sees the body in the world and the world in the body, and both are flawed and routed with pain, and also lyric and lovely and, thank the Maker, most days still fully alive.
Colgate Living Writers brought me to this book and I am grateful. The lyrical poetry is like reading letters/epistles of two friends to each other. They both have experienced medical intrusion into their bodies and a related handicap. Their book walks through this path from Recovery backwards to the Pre-Op. The language and visual imagery is powerful and compelling. I look forward to their reading it. #ColgateLivingWriters
A fascinating project of interactive poem writing, by these two authors who have shared the experience of physical disability and pain. It's in a kind of code, representing not what physically happened to each of them, but instead how it shaped the way they see themselves and the world. I think you can also hear them working out together the ways they can rise above (or have risen above) physical pain.
"Listen, if I can't know what you first whittled me out of I would like to see the knife. . . ."
I don't feel like I read deep enough for poetry, so I've barely scratched the surface of this collection, written as epistolary poems between two friends reflecting on disability and the making and breaking of bodies
As someone who has a fraught relationship with my own body and all the ways it refuses to be in the world as I would like it to, it’s impossible not to connect with these epistolary poems, written between two poets with similar experiences. I don’t know what I can say about this besides I have been waiting so many years to find a book like this, to see this articulated, and I will be reading it again and again.
This collection felt a little diffuse to me, but I would never say no to quiet epistolary poems on disability, nature, and God.
“DEAR S— If the trees know birth is just another word for loss—that there's a cost to shifting from seed to sapling: all the shards of what you were that don't outlast the passage into light; the way the weather breaks across your back just when you learn its shape, splits and scars the wood; how, if you list in one direction there's a whole side of the forest you'll never see— then, god, I love that they do it anyway: become themselves and stand there each spring as it batters them to blooming, asks: what would you weather just to call yourself alive?”
Dear S-- I keep a lot of lanterns in the house for the ways we might one day be able to get lost, a lot of matches so my smaller selves can light their way along the road. They get distracted, drop them lit, a pasture burns: tobacco, strawberries, our skin comes right off with the plaster. They seem surprised, sometimes, by all the damage, other times they're just in love with how the light takes over for awhile. S, you're right, we're all they know. I send them up the road, they trail a blaze right home to climb back down the throat they came from, hungry, tired from the show, and ill-equipped to make it on their own. Who'd have thought it, that anybody's country was in our bones?