Swoon
Swoon
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.
Details
Details
Guernica Editions (Essential Poets Series)
9781771835077
85 pages |
Reviews
Reviews
A seamless and multi-layered poetic journey through art, travel, great writers’ words, bird sightings, strange images, memories, found meaning—often the infusing of the sacred with the mundane—where poet/narrator emerges as witness in wonder, present in each moment.
These poems are definitely feminine and feminist: “Call it sense for survival, if you like, / I call it cunning: I like the femininity of that word, / its verbal noun-ness.” Another point of generosity comes from Wolff sharing with the reader aspects of her poetics: “Is it / the verb that does the big work? as some poets hold…” The reader also gets a sense of the poet's use of ellipses, caesura, and metrical feet.
Building on her compulsion of perception in her fifth collection, Everything Reminds You of Something Else, and its spare, introspective, elliptical, and heart-probing lyrics, Swoon puts the reader “at the crux of wonderment/& tech sophistication,” with poems that are stunningly meditative, ekphrastic, and intense while being musical even in their intrinsic tensions.
FreeFall Magazine
Learn More
Learn More
- November 2020 Winner of the Arc of Awesomeness for "Fall Constellations"
- September 2021 Arc Award of Awesomeness for "Use of the Room"
- Poets in Profile: Elana Wolff on Alice Oswald, Perfect Couplets, and Glorious Misunderstandings
- Interview with Elana Wolff about her Edna Staebler award-winning essay "Paging Kafka's Elegist"
- Taddle Creek: Elana Wolff Reads a Poem from Everything Reminds You of Something Else
- Elana Wolff's Author Note in The Ex-Puritan Town Crier: Music to Poetry
- Elana Wolff's Year of the Horse in The Puritan
- The Maynard Inter-view
- The Huffington Post on Elana's Hunt for Langer's Lost Book of Poems
- Elana Wolff on Open Book's WAR Writers as Readers Series
- Elana Wolff discusses the future of poetry with The Toronto Quarterly
- "Lo" by Elana Wolff, on Leveler Poetry
- Carousel 31- Guernica First Poets Series; Elana Wolff's interview as editor
- Elana reads "Calm" for Poets Corner
- The Maynard reviews Swoon
- "Tumbrel" video poem on periodicities
- Open Book: Poets in Profile with Elana Wolff
- Granville by Elana Wolff read by David Vickery
- Swoon awarded Poetry prize at Canadian Jewish Literary Awards
- Elana reads “Hyoid”
- Taddle Creek magazine features "Swoon"
- “Lunula” in Juniper Volume 2, Issue 1
- “Mamilla Pool” in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry Magazine
- Elana Wolff's #GuernicaVirtualLaunch
- League of Canadian Poets review
- Art Bar Poetry Reading, June 1, 2021 ft. Elana Wolff
Awards
Awards
Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Poetry)
About the author
Elana Wolff has published six solo collections of poetry with Guernica Editions, including You Speak to Me in Trees, awarded the F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry, and, most recently, Swoon, winner of the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. She is also the author of Implicate Me, a collection of essays on contemporary poems; co-author with the late Malca Litovitz of Slow Dancing: Creativity and Illness (Duologue and Rengas); co-editor with Julie Roorda of Poet to Poet: Poems written to poets and the stories that inspired them; and co-translator with Menachem Wolff of Poems and Songs of Love by Georg by Mordechai Langer (from Hebrew), half of the joint volume, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, translated by Thor Polson (from German). A bilingual edition of Elana’s selected poems, Helleborus & Alchémille (Éditions du Noroît) was awarded the 2014 John Glassco Prize for Translation (translator: Stéphanie Roesler). Elana has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her professional time between writing poetry and creative nonfiction, literary editing, and designing and facilitating social art courses.