Proud Flesh

A searing portrait of a mother’s body—a resurrection and reclamation of pleasure after abuse, a study of intergenerational trauma, and a love letter to the bodies of women: as alive and unbound as the teeming Mississippi wilds that bear witness Four months postpartum with her second child, Catherine Simone Gray is back at her doctor’s office, surveying a childbirth wound that refuses to mend. Proud flesh : tissue that overheals to become its own wound. Pregnancy and motherhood had been physicall