The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded

A tenth anniversary edition of one of the most important poetry collections in recent memory, a "devastating and beautiful" (New York Times) reimagining of the Virginia State Colony, a dark epicenter of the American eugenics movement. Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this landmark 2017 book marked the the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself. Molly McCully Brown’s poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed—or inflicted—their agony. Born with cerebral palsy, Brown immerses herself in this devastating past, close to home on so many levels—at first “spastic, palsied, and off-balanced. . . taking crooked notes,” then seeming to embody the patients in the Colony’s dormitories, infirmaries, and notorious blind room (site of some of its most heinous maltreatments). Yet for all the horrors it channels, Brown’s visionary book uplifts through communion: “Another truck comes loud up the road / bearing another girl,” she writes. “There is whatever it is / you’re calling to. There is / however it is you call.” In her poems, Brown listens to the callers from a dark past and takes on their anguish. This tenth anniversary edition of Brown's extraordinary debut features afterwords by acclaimed poets and scholars, considering the book in the context of disability studies, the history of the American South, and the landscape of contemporary American poetry. It also includes a short essay by Brown herself, considering book and its subject a decade after its publication.