Everything Reminds You of Something Else

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Everything Reminds You of Something Else

Thin is the line between dreaming and wakefulness, wellness and disorder, here and there, this and that. Elana Wolff’s poems illuminate the porousness of states and relations, the connective compulsion of poetic perception, in language that blends the oracular and the everyday, the elliptical and the lucent, the playful and the heart-raking. The de- and re-constructive workings of the poems in Everything Reminds You of Something Else argue for empathy and attentiveness. At the core of this work is the belief that art is the sanest rage.

AUTHOR

Elana Wolff

Elana Wolff is the author of seven collections of poetry and a collection of essays on poems. She also has co-authored, with the late Malca Litovitz, a collection of rengas and co-translated, with Menachem Wolff, poems from the Hebrew by Georg Mordechai Langer. Elana’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces have appeared in Canada and internationally and have garnered awards. She has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and currently lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario. Elana’s collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions, 2020), received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her new book, Faithfully Seeking Franz, a hybrid work, is the fruit of a long and ongoing quest for dead mentor, Prague modernist author Franz Kafka.

Reviews

Wolff’s lyrics showcase a world of constant, ironic, and dreadful surprise. Her sensibility is attuned to reversals, and she chooses sharply cut images to communicate her plain-toned shock at the unexpected inconsistencies and awry events … Wolff’s work recalls that of U.S. poet Marianne Moore. There are the same plotted indents and line-lengths, the same detonating denotations.

The poetry collection motivates us to stretch our minds so we can see connections between our own experiences and the themes in these poems. We take our humanity for granted. We do not imagine that we have to actually work on becoming human. The poems, however, push us to realize that this process is as important as being alive.

Elana Wolff’s beautifully crafted Everything Reminds You of Something Else swirls us into the world of pure poetry. Skies, moons, horses, journeys, cities—intense in themselves, vibrate, interact, metamorphose—taking us at once inside the moment and upward to the ether, to connections previously unseen and unsuspected.

… A wonderful work, easily Wolff’s best … Which is saying something. (Her other books are good, too.) Felt like cribbing many lines. And kept trying to think: Are there other words for beauty? Those words could be “Everything Reminds You of Something Else.” Or: just to say, this one is beautiful: full of mystique and music. May these poems draw more readers to her. It would be about time that they did, and find the beauty here.

Wolff loves the elasticity of language (she is also a translator), and crafts heightened methods to describe universal encounters.

Wolff’s poems draw connections and seek to find balance through opposition. Every force of nature, every state of existence is dependent on its opposite. As Wolff puts it, among all things: “Eventually/ the differences collapse.”

Attentiveness in terms of mind and heart is a salient feature in Elana Wolff’s fifth solo collection. Its very title, Everything Reminds You of Something Else, connotes a compulsion of perception that in itself is nothing new in her poetry, but this collection is a progression in the author’s already sophisticated technique.