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Certifiable
By Pamela Mordecai
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 ... Read more
Overview
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.
Pamela Mordecai
Pamela Mordecai is a vital link between the literary worlds of Canada and Jamaica as a poet, editor, publisher, teacher, actor, and former TV presenter. A veteran anthologist, she co-edited the ground-breaking collections Jamaica Woman and Her True-True Name, the first collection of fiction by women from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries. She has published five other books of poetry, including the performance poems de Man and de Book of Mary. Mordecai has also published a short story collection, Pink Icing, and a novel, Red Jacket, that was a finalist for the Rogers Prize for Fiction. Her poems have been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Heinemann Anthology of Caribbean Poetry, Eyeing the North Star, Sisters of Caliban, and Wheel and Come Again. Born and raised in Jamaica, Mordecai now lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Reviews
"Sharp-witted. .. [Mordecai] uses rhyme and metre comfortably, applying these old devices to archly contemporary language. .. verifiably fine. "
— George Elliott Clarke
"Very rich linguistically, imaginatively, and thematically. "
— D.M. Thomas
"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
"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
"Rhythmic verve combined with linguistic vivacity both recreates experience — heady, sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous, painful — and contains it, wittily and wisely. "
— Edward Baugh
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- Dimensions 100 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.28 in
- Published May 1, 2001
- Publisher Goose Lane Editions
- Category Poetry
- Keywords Canadian , Women Authors , Caribbean & Latin American
Other titles by Pamela Mordecai
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