Workshopping the Heart

This witty, moving and accessible collection gathers poems from six previous books, beginning with Death as Mr Right, which won second prize in the 1982 Anne Elder Award for best first poetry book in Australia. With irony and frankness, Jeri Kroll workshops the complex relationships that individuals establish over the course of a lifetime with friends and family, as well as with the physical and social environments that shape them. In particular, she tackles the significance of parenthood, gender and ageing. The collection contains a substantial amount of new work, including extracts from Kroll's verse novel, Vanishing Point, which has been adapted for the stage in the United States.

'... readings from The Mother Workshops would superbly complement and enrich texts by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf.' - Anne Magee, Viewpoint

'The painful ambivalence of ageing's inverted parent/child relationship ... is brilliantly captured ... The toughness of truth tempered throughout by tenderness, this is a perceptive and beautifully balanced tribute.- ' Katharine England, Advertiser

'... there is a strength and vigour in her best poems that make the work of many of her contemporaries seem enervated and vapid. Her characteristic style is direct and forthright, engaging the reader immediately and sustaining that engagement by taut rhythms, metaphoric inventiveness and ironic wit.' - Bev Roberts, Australian Book Review