In the Field Between Us: Poems

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.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017) winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and the essay collection Places I've Taken My Body (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2020.) New work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tin House, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and The New York Times. She teaches at Kenyon College. 

Susannah Nevison  is the author of two collections of poetry, Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019) winner of the 2017 The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Teratology (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. New work has appeared in Tin House, Guernica, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and The New York Times. She teaches at Sweet Briar College.