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A Body, Undone
A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain | Christina Crosby
11 posts | 5 read | 10 to read
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed. In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation. Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.
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review
RebeccaH
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Pickpick

This was so thought-provoking. It's a memoir about the consequences of a terrible bicycle accident and covers both the author's life and ideas about the body and identity.

BarbaraTheBibliophage Looks fascinating. Thanks! 8y
28 likes2 stack adds1 comment
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RebeccaH
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"There are 108 single-word prepositions in the English language, and none is adequate to representing the relation of mind to body."

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RebeccaH
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So so so so fascinating.

saresmoore The last line pictured is incredible. 8y
20 likes1 stack add1 comment
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RebeccaH
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I started this book about dealing with the aftermath of a horrible bicycle crash ... and then the next day my husband crashed his bike. I'm mildly freaked out. But I'm going to keep reading. (And my husband is fine.)

LitHousewife I hope you both are doing better!!! 8y
Riveted_Reader_Melissa That is very freaky! 8y
27 likes1 stack add3 comments
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pgh.femme
Panpan

Just not compelling. Poorly written and disjointed. Laden with unexamined privilege

2 likes1 stack add
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pgh.femme
Panpan

A slog.

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mhippo

"We speak of being /in/ a body, as though the self were somehow contained in a bodily exterior. Conversely, we understand the body as materiality held within an encompassing self-consciousness.. Inside and outside run into each other, as when you run your finger along the side of a Möbius strip."

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mhippo
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"... The tropes of pain display the awkwardness of catachresis."

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Robspillman
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From Maggie Nelson's mentor. Ready to be upended.

tkmadden how is it ? 8y
Robspillman Brave, smart, thought-provoking. 8y
16 likes3 stack adds2 comments
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RebeccaH
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Just got approved for this one!

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Kenny
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I am not someone who needs more than a Maggie Nelson recommendation and this is the book she keeps talking about lately.

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