Swoon

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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.

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

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.

– League of Canadian Poets

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.

– The Maynard

Attentive to the mysteries of their worlds, the speakers in Elana Wolff’s sixth poetry collection, Swoon, incarnate the same sensual curiosity that characterized the author’s previous collection, Everything Reminds You of Something Else (Guernica, 2017). While that title announced Wolff’s penchant for allusive expression, Swoon suggests the affective experience centred in her searching, spiritual lyrics.

– Arc Poetry Magazine

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.

Wolff’s verse angles forward and sidewise, painting sounds and voicing colours. Her chromatic scales encompass polyphonic hues and cries of lament, rhapsody, flora and fauna, in a precise interplay of self and others.