Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry
The poems in Swoon speak to the steady wending of a life's thematic drama: the falling / rising permutations across biographical phases. Indications are filtered through relationship, encounter, art, the natural world, and dream. Associations coalesce in a rhythmic clocking of feeling / thought. Randomness and accident may have a part to play, destiny and mystery, too; suggestion of a plot. There's storyline unfolding that resists a denouement.
Industry Reviews
"Elana Wolff's poems yearn for transcendence, but they are too wise to expect it in the form of a lightning bolt. Instead they deftly evoke insights glimpsed on the periphery, the small startlings and veil-liftings that connect us to each other, to nature, to memory, to ideas beyond human understanding. Wherever they travel, they leave my senses tingling." -- Adam Sol, author of How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry
"Yes, you don't want to keep this Wolff from thy door! Yes, you want to let her injust as you want to let in sunlight and fresh airbecause "Love is loopy like that. / Like punching Sun, / getting drubbed, blessing the light // that blinds." You want to delve into and collect the proverbs, "Remarkable yet ordinary: glass in a wooden casement." This goddess Wolff hath instructions for Life, for Liberty: "A poet tried his life at vice and stayed / as guileless as a child ..." (O, Blake is prowling, pouncing, pronounce!) Do learn that "Those enfolded in / feeling are like those with no emotion at all: demolished." Wolff's tracks approach the scriptural: "I call it cunning: I like the femininity of that word, / its verbal noun-ness." So much wisdom is here for you to swoon overwith all-consuming Desire, with unfaltering Consummation, headlong and reckless, in the wreaking, in the taking; with unsullied shimmeringeven with Threatthe ungovernable coffinalways impeding, aye, my darling!" -- George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2016 & 2017)
"These poems, "Suffering efficiently the light," hold us to witness and to account. They render the inner and outer worlds we seek to navigate each day. Their sensory intimacies, especially their sonic landscapes, near and far in space and time, resonate with elemental and existential messages. Their rigor and tenderness mix mysteriously, unsettlingly. They are water, night, flight, rest, memory, dream. Read them and know." -- Sandra Barry, author of Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia's Home-Made Poet
"With Swoon, Elana Wolff unveils long-held personal experiences, and wraps them in words that bring them into today and #MeToo awareness. Difficult elements from the past are balanced beautifully by her careful observations of birds and the cycles of nature. Whether praising or chastising the world, language is key, with the movement from one poem to the next as natural as breathing." -- Heidi Greco, author of Practical Anxiety
