Reviews

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: Poems, by Molly McCully Brown

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jialatlibrary's review

challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

5.0

major TW for institutionalisation, ableism, sickness, abuse. proceed at your own risk, though with caution 🗑️

i first read Molly’s work in Places I’ve taken my Body. Molly’s brilliance, clarity, and exacting language spans across many works, unrelenting.

Virginia is about the notorious now demolished asylum under terrible eugenics there.

Brown’s writing is a spear raised in the crowd of the many of us who have suffered at the hands of the state. it is not illuminating, it is glaring and radiating. They speak strongly about imagined years in the ex state asylum. truly horrific.

but that’s nothing new. as a ward who has been institutionalised repeatedly for years, and then been harshly abused, taken taken advantage of, I feel so seen so seen, so heard, and so validated.

the disabled and mentally ill are strongly confronted against in the systems in my country. the systems are truly merciless. but this, writing like this, is the kind of representation that truly makes a difference. writing like this brings hope. Thank you, Molly.

(borrowed from the library, returning so others can be dazzled🤩)

Content Warnings

scoobydoobyboo's review

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challenging emotional sad slow-paced

3.0

read for school!! beautiful and insightful but very difficult at the same time

kennethwade's review

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4.75

Stunning work that brilliantly interweaves reality and re-enactment. Clear, concisely rendered, and so grounded.

Content Warnings

laurelinwonder's review

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5.0

Molly McCully Brown inspired 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, has written an insanely good collection of poems, a albeit fictional elegy for those committed. This is one hell of a project, that just punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the ears, and refused to be put down.
These poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed—or inflicted—their agony. Brown immerses herself in this devastating past, then seeming to embody the patients in the Colony’s dormitories, infirmaries, and notorious blind room.

If you read one poetry collection this summer, hell this year, this should be that book.

jaccarmac's review

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challenging dark sad fast-paced

4.0

The poems in this collection are all plain-language, laid out on pages with plenty of space. The one that drew me in, Transubstantiation, is blockier and more lyrical than the rest of its fellows, but not hugely an outlier. Thus, I'm impressed most by the variation in voice Molly McCully Brown manages in her debut. The subject matter and its history are a deep cavern, these poems opening. But they are also economical, never bludgeoning one or sticking out of place. The photographic pages might, a little. Too easy to read, in the best way.