Pamela Mordecai 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 pushes collective ideas of the human condition -- white, black, sane, mad, Canadian, Jamaican, related, unrelated -- into a matrix of unstereotyped experience, where we manoeuvre only by dead reckoning, helped, with luck, by the light of the word. Some poems in the book explore the truths hidden beneath the ideal of love: love as comfort, love as currency, love as deathtrap. Others embrace the fullness of sisterhood, from the conceptual "sister muse" as a power in the world to the sometimes antagonistic love among flesh-and-blood sisters. Finally, the book springs from intimacy with little and big madnesses.Certifiable is guided by the creole soundscape, with its rhythms and rhymes, its penchant for pun and word play, and its deep respect for highfalutin', felicitous "talking sweet" language. Mordecai's own language flows through and beyond standard English and the creole continuum to reveal the characters in Certifiable and record their experiences.