Certifiable

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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.

AUTHOR

Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Mordecai writes poetry, fiction and plays. Her collections of poetry are Journey Poem, de Man: a performance poem, Certifiable, The True Blue of Islands, Subversive Sonnets, de book of Mary: a performance poem, Up Tropic, and A Fierce Green Place: new and selected poems. Her first collection of short fiction, Pink Icing and Other Stories, appeared to enthusiastic reviews in 2006, and her first novel, Red Jacket, was published in 2015 and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Award. Her writing for children is widely collected and well known internationally. El Numero Uno, a play for young people, had its world premiere at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto in 2010 and its Caribbean premiere at the Edna Manley School for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, in 2016. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews

Certifiable pushes collective ideas of the human condition — white/black, sane/mad, Canadian/Jamaican — into a matrix of unstereotyped experience where we manoeuvre only by dead reckoning and by the light of the word. In language guided by the creole soundscape, Mordecai’s poems explore the truths hidden beneath the ideal of love, the fullness of sisterhood, and the intimate knowledge of little and big madnesses.
“Sharp-witted… [Mordecai] uses rhyme and metre comfortably, applying these old devices to archly contemporary language… verifiably fine.”
– 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.”
“Very rich linguistically, imaginatively, and thematically.”
“Rhythmic verve combined with linguistic vivacity both recreates experience — heady, sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous, painful — and contains it, wittily and wisely.”
“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.”