“You can take what you want,” the final poem of Henrietta Goodman’s highly confessional debut collection tells us, “and what you want / will want to be taken.” This logic is both the eponymous source of Take What You Want and its hopeful promise. It yields a kind of syllogism: We can take what we want. What we want wants to be taken. We want what wants us.

The question is, how does this hold up in a confessional setting? A priest does not reason the want in taking confession. Similarly it is not the prerogative of sojourners in this private, emotional world, to want—but only to take whatever the confessor/poet gives. The poetry seems aware of this, as in Slick Trick>

In the morning he wants me to tell stories. How will you know what’s true, I ask.

Inevitably, we won’t, we can’t. Perhaps more to the point, these diary-page heartache philosophies and sexual memories want us to want them, as if in the wanting and the telling abides some knowledge: “I am thinking of the magnetic pull of pain / to pain,” we are told, “thinking know me, know me, know me.” These are shades of the over-young tart schoolgirl on the book’s cover, to whom the false-modest question posed in “Madrones” surely has not occurred: “What must it be like to know, / to be so open, / so at home in the world?”

Take is broken up into four nameless sections, moving chronologically from youthful love affairs to motherhood as females experience degrees of womanly revelation in their relationships with men—lovers, husbands, sons (Goodman rarely makes it past a second stanza of her short poems before introducing some male or other). As a confessional document, Take is more James Frey than Augustine. God, for example, makes only a brief cameo in the final poem. Along the way, our heroine makes out with a bear (“Bear #1”) and tells us her breasts have turned into “soggy cartons” (“Ars Poetica”), all in a verse that, while technically free, is far from rollicking. In this thought-world, confession is less a literary trope than a means of catharsis—usually associated with song-writing—in which experience does not deviate from its testimony in song, or verse. Take is the song of a woman who has lived only to pronounce all the pain and beauty yet known to her in a bold act of self expression. By doing so, she is transformed. Pace Transparancy>

and here you are, caught by what you know you felt, as though the mere fact of the frozen image means you can never have it back—to look on, yes, but not to look out from.