Description

"In Janine Certo's Elixir, the vivacity of the sensuous world serves also as a constant memento mori; like the Renaissance vanitas still lifes,

such worldly pleasures shuttle us from the material to the spiritual. These are poems of luxury and joy-fried artichokes and art galleries.

Limoncello and La bohème. But Certo is too smart for such comforts to exist unexamined. For glinting from the underbelly of ease is its constant

endangerment. Death lurks behind each poem, so that the same mind that gives us hand-dipped ricotta reveals to us, as well, tender portraits

of a father's agonizing decline.'I believe in new edges, ' Certo writes. And it's true-there are constant transformations at work throughout Elixir.

On the one hand, beauty masks decay: 'Write until the sage & fir candle kills the smell / of the wall's rotting mouse.' On the other, though, is the more difficult, the wiser, conversion: 'The vacuum's defective, so it sings.' Thankfully, Certo has recorded for us such stunning songs."

COREY VAN LANDINGHAM

"Janine Certo is a poet of grief and joy who searches inward and outward to find the transcendent meaning of 'house and universe.' Hers is a rare achievement: a philosopher's intelligence at work in poems of the domestic and natural worlds. In the deeply moving pantoum 'Elixir for My Father, ' she weaves together her book's motifs: Italian American roots and family, love, life, and loss. Like idiosyncratic objects on a home altar, these poems are offerings of longing and hope. Through odes and elegies, her keen powers of observation and elegant language shine. Always, she holds onto beauty: '... this sweet/bright life full of heartbeat/ & memory.' "