What He Took

by Wendy Mnookin

Beginning with an auto accident that occurred during a family outing that took the life of Ms. Mnookin’s father, the ensuing poems track the effect of that tragedy and loss, as the family heals from disaster, as the child grows up in a household with a stepfather and makes her uneasy way into adulthood, all under the shadow of a psychic uneasiness born of loss and impermanence. Wendy Mnookin ’s poetry has received awards from journals including The Comstock Review, Kansas Quarterly and New Millennium Writings . She was a 1999 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches poetry in Boston. Also available by Wendy Mnookin
To Get Here
TP $12.50, 1-880238-73-X o CUSA

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Wendy Mnookin is the author of four books of poetry, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, What He Took, To Get Here and Guenever Speaks. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Mnookin teaches at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing program in Boston. She has also taught at workshops around the country, including The Music of Words in Bend, Oregon, the Writers' Center in Chautauqua, New York, and the Writers' Garret in Dallas, Texas. Born in New York City, Mnookin now lives with her husband in Boston, where they raised their three children.

Reviews

[Danielle]

Real rating 3.5

[Nina]

The narrative arc of What He Took is the death of the speaker’s father when she was just a toddler. Mnookin acknowledges that these poems are based on her own life experience. Many of the poems lead the reader to wonder what is memory, and what are the stories that have been told.
Don’t tell me I was only two.
Tell me something
that will touch my father,
(Please)

The traumatic death of a parent certainly shapes a person’s life, and in an interview with Karen Rigby, Mnookin shares that her “way of being in the world is filtered through an awareness that you lose the people you love.” These poems struggle with the fact that she survived the car accident that took her father’s life. Abandonment is implied in “Shouldn’t He Have Done Something?”
did he raise his hands
and claw red stripes down God’s chest,
whatever it took, shouldn’t he
have done something to stay with me?

The poems in the first section are written in the voice of the two-year-old, talking about the accident, the hospital, and her father’s death. In the second section, Mnookin’s mother remarries, and the persona of the speaker ages a bit into a little girl who wants to claim her “new father.”
I want my new father’s name.
I’m grown-up if I put Miss before it.
(My New Father’s Name)

In the third section, Mnookin writes of her adult life, yet the threat of loss is always present. She is outside one day with her own two-year-old when a car pulls up and the driver tries to talk to Mnookin’s daughter.
I picked up my daughter
and pressed her tightly to me,
tasting the sweat on her neck.
I didn’t want to understand

my arms could be holding nothing,
(In the Garden)

The longing never completely goes away. In “I Can’t Find His Obituary on Microfilm,” Mnookin declares
So my father isn’t dead.
She then tells him to
Come back in late afternoon,
before the streetlamps come on,

These poems are tightly crafted. Mnookin manages to enlarge her story in order to engage her reader. The flow of the book is even more evident on subsequent readings.

[Jerry]

I read it because I wanted to use it as a guideline to write poetry on memories, or events in my family, in which I had no readily available memory.