a body undone living on after great pain

Is no bigger than a chocolate bar and yet But even there the verse is marked with a blank helplessness:Ĭaused the fracture, the space that’s injured Nelson, for her part, devoted a third of her early poetry collection Something Bright, Then Holes, to a section of poems called “In the Hospital for Special Care,” about visiting Crosby in the weeks following the accident. Her descriptions of her life circle around what the accident did to her, but never succeed in grasping it completely.

What’s striking about Crosby’s telling isn’t the drama of her injury, but how the cataclysm of the accident seems to lie beyond words. They move haltingly, as when a child first tries to use chopsticks. Physical therapy enabled her to eventually turn the pages of books, but years later her fingers are still stiff.

She was left with little movement in her arms and hands, and almost none below the breastbone she will never walk again. But what permanently changed her life was the fracture to her spine. “The wire-rim glasses I was wearing were deeply enough embedded in the bridge of my nose to leave a dark half-moon scar between my eyebrows,” she says. She was thrown forward, and landed on her chin. She’d been a cyclist for years, going on long charity rides and buying elegant, light framed bikes.Ĭrosby remembers looking forward to her ride that afternoon she doesn’t remember the twig getting caught in her wheel spokes. She was always athletic: She grew up playing sports and wrestling with her brother, and her account of her life is saturated with savoring descriptions of sex, exercise, and other physical joys. An English professor at Wesleyan, Crosby found herself with a few spare hours one afternoon in the fall of 2003, just a few days after she turned fifty. Both write through a feeling of being unseen, and both of their books can be read as defiant protests against misidentification.Ĭrosby’s memoir begins, as she says disability stories always must, with her accident. But what Crosby’s project shares with Nelson’s is that both women have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being seen as a genre of person-a mother for Nelson, a quadriplegic for Crosby-whose life does not fit within genre conventions. Nelson writes of Crosby with gentle admiration Crosby writes about Nelson with the kind of delighted pride that you usually only hear from parents.Ī Body Undone is a very different book from Nelson’s, and Crosby is a very different writer: Her work is more academic in its habits and more withholding in its confessions. The relationship between the two women is clearly one of immense tenderness and intellectual generosity. The Maggie here is Maggie Nelson, the poet and memoirist, who has written extensively about her friendship with Crosby-notably in last year’s The Argonauts, an autobiographical reckoning of gender and motherhood. A BODY, UNDONE: LIVING ON AFTER GREAT PAIN by Christina Crosby NYU Press, 208 pp, $22.95

A body undone living on after great pain