Take What You Want

"Henrietta Goodman's debut rivets with its accuracy, honesty and fluency. These poems have tonal ranges necessary for the complexities Goodman tackles, sometimes tames, more often allows to remain feral and wild. At times the poems read as if they were urgent instructions hell-bent on keeping us alive. Take What You Want isn't shy about giving us a lot of what we need."-Dara Wier

The earthy, intelligent poems in this compelling debut employ elements of fairy tale, dream, and animal life to reveal little-addressed aspects of familial and sexual love and of motherhood, bringing sharply into focus the often inexplicable ties of one individual to another.

From "Physics":

. . . His hand tangles in my hair as the train passes, and in that blur of sound and light things are settled by a force outside ourselves, as we had hoped would happen. In the afternoon, the green plums hang invisible on the green tree. At night they glow with a powdery green light of their own- sour enough to last a while, sour enough, surely.

Henrietta Goodman has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Montana Arts Council and the Marjorie Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Hubbub, Northwest Review, and other journals. Originally from North Carolina, she currently teaches at the Writing Center at the University of Montana.