"In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so uncommon it doesn’t even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course . . . In her sharp, affecting new memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission . . . From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like 'heavenly bodies' that 'fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.' Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown . . . Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful."—Emily Mitchell, The New York Times Book Review