Swallow

A beguiling and deeply rewarding exploration of Philadelphia's Mutter Museum Foreign Body Collection, drawers filled with items that have been swallowed. It is also a quirky portrait of Dr Chevalier Jackson, the pioneering laryngologist who extracted these items non-surgically. Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, Capello explores the physiology of the human swallow, the poignant and psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive items. A history of racism, violence, class and poverty and forced ingestion.

Mary Cappello is the author of Awkward (a Los Angeles Times bestseller), Called Back, and Night Bloom. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, she teaches at the University of Rhode Island and lives in Providence.