Guernica Editions
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Everything Reminds You of Something Else
Guernica Editions, Spring 2017
72 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771831895
ISBN10: 1771831898
English
$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
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.
Some things you can never hold: / The whorl that reels behind your eyes.
… 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
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.
George Elliott Clarke
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
Reviews
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Everything Reminds You of Something Else
Quill & Quire - March 20, 2017
Books by Elana Wolff
