For senior secondary students and adults. In the heart of this finely balanced collection, Jeri Kroll confronts the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s disease as well as the mother-daughter relationship in its final stages.
What the reviewers say:
“The painful ambivalence of ageing’s inverted parent/child relationship . . . is brilliantly captured in poems such as “The Toxic Parent” and “Lift Off.” The toughness of truth tempered throughout by tenderness, this is a perceptive and beautifully balanced tribute.”
- Katharine England, The Advertiser, 8 May 2004.
“This is a wonderful collection and the teacher in me cries out for a class set of The Mother Workshops. While the texts themselves could be read primarily by senior students as exploring the poet’s changing relationship with her mother…they can also be read, more generically, in relation to all parent-child relationships, about the moments when the lines of authority and power waver and the baton – or distaff – is passed to the next generation. Furthermore, as intertextual treats for teachers and students, readings from The Mother Workshops would superbly complement and enrich texts by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Laude and Virginia Woolf…”
- Anne Magee, feature in Viewpoint 12 [3] Spring 2004 23.
