Becoming Eve

Bordighera Press 

Release date: October 20, 2026 (Preorders available here!)

In these lush, almost meditative poems, Certo's poems are an aperture to the dangerous world that exists simultaneously with an assortment of quotidian delights: the mother who loves the nature world, a beloved dog as silent witness, the bread bitten by the hungry mouth, and the ever changing seasons that turn one reality into another. Love is an embodied experience, an elixir of the connoisseur, bridging our loves past, present and ever present, that exist in one form or another all around us. 

-Michelle Reale, author of Let it Be Extravagant

Janine Certo’s Becoming Eve is full of joy and sensual pleasure, no matter the grief and pain. At the center is a woman navigating divorce, online dating, new love, letting go of a dear mother…as well as surviving a stalker and a university shooting. Welcome to today’s world, far removed from Eden. Clear as a bell, Certo’s crystalline lines—etched with slant rhyme and sly enjambments—sing down the page, intensifying meaning, echoing long after you’ve put the book down.

-Page Hill Starzinger, author of Vortex Street

Short Bio: Janine Certo is the author four full-length poetry collections: Becoming Eve (Bordighera Press, forthcoming 2026), O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (2023), Elixir, 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 scholarly book, Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of School (Routledge, 2018) and a chapbook, Home Altar, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Editor’s Choice Award for Hole in the Head Review’s Charles Simic Memorial Prize, her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University, an assistant poetry editor at Italian Americana, and a Level Two Sommelier.