Part distilled observation, part imaginative act, part spiritual expedition, the lyrically-idiosyncratic poems in Startled Night plumb the struggle of integrating the shadow, of coming into personhood and love-through the life processes of encounter and crisis, also through the chiaroscuro of art, image, and word. The decisive moment is perpetual, which is why the story cannot be finite

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.

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'Take You Speak to Me in Trees, Elana Wolff's accomplished third collection... though Wolff's poems are full of striking imagery, it's their metaphoric reach that most impresses... Wolff writes that she practises "seeing / deeply in the dimness." You Speak to Me in Trees is proof that her vision is sharp indeed.' - Barbara Carey, Toronto Star