Poetry

To Get Here

In To Get Here, Wendy Mnookin takes us into a family transformed by the unexpected–a child in danger. Using shifting chronology and different voices, Mnookin explores the family's efforts to understand the changing reality of their lives. As the child's distress threatens to engulf them, we come to understand more about our own struggles to save those we love and, finally, to love even those we cannot save.

Superman

The chair is hard.
The afternoon sun leaves no cool corner.
And that jittery pecking of birds--
his mother's fingers, plucking at threads.

He stares through her fingers,
through the spooling thread, out
past the barn, the lowing spotted cow,
past corn tassels flaunting pollen,
over molecules, their tumbling polka--

who wants to look
like his mother sews his clothes,
wants to feel pinned
and gathered and snipped and sewed,
tucked and buttoned inside?

FormatPaperback

Publication DateJuly 1, 1999

ISBN188023873

$12.00

About the Author

Wendy Mnookin is the author of five collections of poetry, including three from Boa Editions: The Moon Makes Its Own Plea (2008), What He Took (2002) and To Get Here (1999). She has received a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her books have won awards from the New England Poetry Club and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She has taught poetry at Boston College, Emerson College, and Grub Street, as well as at varous workshop venues around the country. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and runs the Poetry Roundtable at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. For more information about Wendy Mnookin, visit www.wendymnookin.com