Handfeeding the Crocodile
210 x 148 mm 68 pp colour cover, paperback, perfect bound
Price $AU 20.00
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About the book
Handfeeding the Crocodile, a powerful and substantial collection by award-winning writer Gina Mercer, confirms her status as an eloquent and nationally significant poet. Structured around the tension between peace and danger in everyday life, it resonates with the personal response to contemporary global anxieties. Mercer explores, with her trademark sensuality, the themes of grief, joy, motherhood, female embodiment and intimate friendship. Handfeeding the Crocodile was shortlisted in the inaugural Alec Bolton Award, ArtsACT, a national competition for unpublished poetry manuscripts in 2005. It is proudly published by Pardalote Press with the assistance of a grant from ArtsTasmania.
Reviews
'Gina Mercer shares Sylvia Plath's capacity to gaze, unflinching, at life's toughest moments but at the same time she is a poet who knows how to have fun, to profoundly celebrate life's joyous moments. And who could imagine saying that of Plath?' - Maureen Bettle, Convenor of Creative Writing, University of Canberra
'An outstanding collection. These are poems of brilliant directness and lucidity, poems with a strong and compelling female voice, utterly unafraid. One reads such a collection as one reads a novel: to discover, sometimes with alarming intimacy, who the writer is and what she can tell us about the difficult business of living in the world. For any reader, it's moving, honest, human, memorable. For the connoisseur, it's poetry moving at a high level of grace and definition: a major collection announcing a poet's full maturity.' - Peter Bishop, Creative Director, Varuna
Quotes from a review by Alison Lambert in Australian Women's Book Review, 19.1:
'Gina Mercer's Handfeeding the Crocodile offers the support system of a warm sensual woman friend.'
'This is the kind of book I'd be happy to give my sister, knowing she'd love its delicate and straightforward raunchiness, its sensitivity to suffering and the deeper issues.'
'Mercer's poems are like nests on the narrow ledges of cliff faces. The material, the closely observed matter of women's lives, is woven into a cosy refuge, a place from which one's own experiences may break out of their shells ... yet always there is the vertigo, the reality of the drop to the abyss right there at the edge.'
Read the rest of the review 'Of Roses, the Risqué, and Risk'
Author profile
Read Gina Mercer's profile here.