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.

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 and 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.

Elana Wolff's profile page

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.

Bywords

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.

Elizabeth Greene

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

Quill and Quire

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.

What Is That Book About

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.”

Vallum Magazine

… 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.

B.W. Powe