Monika Andersson

Wendy Mnookin was born in New York City, graduated from Radcliffe College and received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College.  Her first book, Guenever Speaks, is a cycle of persona poems.  Her poetry has received awards from journals including The Comstock Review, Kanas Quarterly and New Millennium Writings.  Wendy is a 1999 recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She lives with her husband in Newton, Massachusetts, where they have raised their three children, and teaches a poetry workshop at Boston College.
 

Samples of the poet’s work:

 
                Six
 

His father's rough
mustache against his cheek, and then
I lean down, Good night,
and he burrows into my perfume,
pulls the pillow close.
He listens to our footsteps on the stairs,
the front door,
the car in the driveway,

he listens to blood
pulsing through his body, the blip,
blip at the arch of his foot, the bend
of his knee.  He recites
his name, his middle name,
address and phone number, area
code, counts the windows in his room,
counts every window in the whole house.

The shadows on the wall
refuse to assume the body
of a Tonka truck, toothed scoop of the crane
tangled.  When I come home
I go to him, blue dress grazing
his clenched hands.  His eyes
shine.  Look, I say, aiming the flashlight
under the bed.  Nothing.
 

 
         His Odyssey
 

Pants slung low on his hips,
my son would walk forever

toward the burn
of lights in every window.

He loves the silver bodies
of knives on the counter

of the Fourth Street Bar,
the piss-dark smell of subways;

he loves the Hare Krishna,
shaved head wobbling

on the stem of his saved neck.
He even loves the man

blanketed in layers of brown
paper bags, loves the crayoned cardboard

FEED ME, and he would if he could.
All my son needs is a good night’s

sleep, food in the fridge,
a friend, a lover, a mother

to lock the door against strays
mangy and starved and begging.
 

Also:   “Heroin”, “Daytime TV” and “Annie Oakley Blows Kisses to Her Audience”.

Read Wendy’s salon.com article “My son, the junkie”.

Hear Wendy and Seth Mnookin’s interview on NPR’s The Connection.

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