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“This exquisite exchange of poem-letters between two disabled writers traces their struggle to find purchase in inhospitable landscapes―topographical, social, emotional, semantic.”
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.
“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.” —Ilya Kaminsky
“Brown and Nevison have composed a remarkable, mortal duet, an exchange of poems so attuned to each other, the voices blend. Both speakers have suffered dire illness and the cracking open of the body. A poetry of shared images—bloodmaps, rivers, trees, birds, bones, shards, leaking light—rises from the wreckage in a tough, passionate, and ultimately anonymous lyricism.”—Rosanna Warren