In What He Took, Wendy Mnookin explores early loss. Trying to understand the death of her father when she was two, Mnookin considers memory and imagination and how they merge in our efforts to salvage the past. The poems move from the time of his death to the years of growing up with a new father, making her way into adulthood, marrying and starting her own family, always with a longing for the absent father and a sense of the nearness of loss.
“What He Took is an elegy to the father Wendy Mnookin lost to an automobile accident when she was a child. It is also a book of passage, of her journey from the day, stranded in a field, to an adulthood informed by that day. . . . This collection, this whole, is rich in unpretentious, lyrical poems.” —Lola Haskins
Winner of the 2002 Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
This Is It
He needs to think of what's important.
And so my father thinks of plums,
the small hard plums he found by the road
the summer he was seventeen
and biked through France. The first bite
was tart, almost bitter—
he sucked in his cheeks with surprise—
but somehow the next was sweeter.
© BOA Editions, Ltd 2002
Available editions:
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Paperback
ISBN: 1-929918-19-4
Price: $13.95
Publishing Date: May 2002
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