O Body of Bliss

This collection is so damn good I want to quote from every exploration inside every poem: food, family, love, tragedy, humor, religion and death, Certo's O Body of Bliss possesses an incisive immediacy, replete with surprises, that grabs and won't let go: "Who wasn't shoved in a room by Boy Who Would Grow Up/To Be Rapist, his hands at work while her friends picked the lock?" Storyteller and lyric poet all in one, in "Ode to the Airbnb," she asks: "isn't it/ sacred to be someone else, stepping over/ the threshold into their skin, into the history/ of closets, into the wall spaces between framed/ photos bound in their hall light, their wanderings/ and absences, their quilts and smells, the lives/ of the hearth and the lock on the storage room." The range of her conjuring coupled with her linguistic gifts leave me awestruck.

- Roger Weingarten

JANINE CERTO is the author of three full-length poetry collections: O Body of Bliss (2023), winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry; Elixer, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021); and In the Corner of the Living, runner up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2017). She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Home Altar, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). A winner of the Nimrod International Journal's Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University.