Wendy Mnookin : What He Took / To Get Here SIGNED poetry books
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TWO autographed poetry books: Wendy Mnookin
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What He Took (American Poets Continuum) Paperback – May 1, 2002
When she was only two years old, Wendy Mnookin and her young family were involved in a tragic car accident. She and her mother survived with injuries, but Mnookin's 27-year-old father succumbed to his injuries.
"What He Took" begins with this tragedy, and it is the enduring and haunting theme which carries the entire book. We follow Mnookin through the sweet and sad tenuousness of her earliest memories (Mnookin has memories of the accident which her family tries to tell her can't be true, as she was too young to remember) and on through her childhood into adulthood. Mnookin skillfully and candidly shows how the loss of a father affected every part of her life, from the conflicted emotions she felt with her adoring step-father, to the separateness she felt with other children who had living fathers (including her own half-sister), to the bitter-sweet relief she felt when doing atom bomb drills at school, knowing that if the bomb does drop, she would be guided into heaven by her father.
To Get Here Paperback – July 15, 1999
A cycle of poems describing a mothers dumb grief as it unfolds in the face of her disturbed sons long and painful unraveling. Mnookins verse possesses the twin virtues of clarity and focus. Domestic vignettes centering on one particular family (How I love / these winter afternoons in our bedroom, / dark by four, the children settled / around the low table) are inevitably subjective, but the slow delineation of personality and character (Hes all eager gesture, punctuating words / now with outstretched palm, / now with fingers stroking the fuzz on his chin) contained in these works saves them from self-indulgence. Mnookin favors a flat, seemingly affectless tone that conveys a strong sense of both menace (to study / acoustical tiles / when the doctor / asks my son / which drugs hes taken) and foreboding (Im folding laundry to child abuse / on Oprah, smoothing warm undershirts / as one by one the women describe / what they do to their children, although / the longer I listen I realize its not what they do / but what they fear they might) and also keeps the sentimentality of family life from overpowering the atmosphere. Although its quickly apparent that the real drama here is in the downward spiral of the disturbed son, the collection overall centers on the broader threat to the happiness of the family as a wholea shift of perspective that simultaneously sharpens and diffuses the pain in a manner both touching and marvelously harsh. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates
Mnookin's work has been published in numerous journals, including The Greensboro Review, Harvard Review, and, Prairie Schooner. Anthology publications include Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems about Marriage, and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and teaches writing workshops.
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