Certifiable
Toronto writer Pamela Mordecai is a well-known voice in poetry of the Caribbean diaspora. She has long been a popular anthologist, a mentor to other writers, a frequent contributor to literary journals, and a vital link between the literary worlds of Canada and Jamaica; Certifiable presents a maturing vision of women's lives in both of her homes. Certifiable celebrates experience shot through with affection, family attachment, and madness.
The poems in the first section, "Just a Likl Loving," explore the truths hidden beneath the ideal of love: love as comfort, love as currency, love as deathtrap. "Sister Sequence" embraces the fullness of sisterhood, from the conceptual "sister muse" as a power in the world to the ambivalent love among flesh-and-blood sisters. "Certifiable," the final section, springs from intimacy with little and big madnesses.
The rhythms and rhymes of the creole soundscape crackle through Certifiable. Mordecai's deft hand wordplay flows through and beyond standard English and the Creole continuum to reveal the characters in Certifiable and record their experiences.
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"Sharp-witted... [Mordecai] uses rhyme and metre comfortably, applying these old devices to archly contemporary language... verifiably fine." — The Chronicle Herald
"In Certifiable, language is both weapon and redeemer. Pamela Mordecai's facility with language, her striking rhythms and word play, and, above all, her wicked humour lift Certifiable from the pull of madness to the divine." — Olive Senior
"Very rich linguistically, imaginatively, and thematically." — D.M. Thomas
"Rhythmic verve combined with linguistic vivacity both recreates experience — heady, sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous, painful — and contains it, wittily and wisely." — Edward Baugh
"Certifiable invokes subversive, irreverent, but infinitely lyrical Jamaican women's voices and affirms their singing, not to deny suffering, but to give account of it, in a complex emotional landscape and without sumission or despair." — Elaine Savory
Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican Canadian author whose first short story collection, Pink Icing, received rave reviews and whose debut novel, Red Jacket, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has been described as “brilliant” by Kamau Brathwaite and as “immaculately crafted” by Kwame Dawes and has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (now the Otherwise Award) for writing in the speculative fiction or fantasy genre. She has written nine collections of poetry, including a trilogy about the life of Jesus in Jamaican Patwa (de book of Joseph, de book of Mary, and de Man) and a collection of new and selected poems, A Fierce Green Place. With her late husband, Martin, she also wrote a reference work called Culture and Customs of Jamaica. A recipient of the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary and Bronze Medals for her contributions to Jamaican literature, she blogs at pamelamordecai.ca and writes the occasional critical essay. Two Days in Mayaro is her second collection of stories.
