About the book
About the author
Born in Saskatchewan, moving to the West Coast as a young child, Elaine Woo is a poet, librettist, comics creator, artist, non-fiction writer, and video-maker. She graduated from the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program and began her writing career in 2006. Elaine has published two poetry collections: Cycling with the Dragon (2014, Nightwood Editions) and Put Your Hand in Mine (2019, Signature Editions). In 2021 Put Your Hand in Mine was cited by Sheryl MacKay on CBC Radio’s Northwest by Northwest and bookseller Tamara Gorin as one of the three best poetry collections in recent years. Elaine also translated French Canadian Jean-Paul Martino’s Git Net from French to English. This translation in turn spawned multiple translations internationally. Her work has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, France, and Hong Kong, and appears in print or online in Prism International, Grain, The Maynard, The Elephants, Arc Poetry, carte blanche, West Coast Line, Otoliths, and h&, and in the anthologies Sustenance, Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, Shy (winner of an Independent Book Publishers silver medal in 2014), The Enpipe Line, and V6A. Her poetry was featured in New York City’s Arteidolia in a collaboration with her close friend, Margaret Schulz Johnston. An alumna of the Vancouver International Song Institute’s (VISI) Art Song Lab, her art song collaboration with composer Daniel Marshall won a Boston Metro Opera festival prize in 2013.
Excerpt
Rope
stuck in a well
water surface ripple-fraught
chains of skimming ovals,
rotate: blocks alphabet of depression
daylight of idealism snuffed
crawling on my hands knees slipping
skidding along murky bottom until
a crack in the stonework
seeps in an idea:
rope up or down
live this present
not that
not then
or that apex future,
with each now this
plunge
progress
Template
Unwound a spool of time hung it up to cure
amid blush/white roses enquiring of light
patterned waffles of almond-brown soil
sable-tipped palm tree fronds
big sigh of escaping cars
diminished sun
feet whine, eyelids flicker
waylaid by calluses of malaise
desire to clasp something/anything
with the aim of appeasement
mind ravenous mmmrrhh
lay imaginary footprints on pavement
set toes in front of each other, step, step off
later, wonder why that didn’t come to mind before
Compartments
A nautilus shell, chambers
walled from the others
This is how, intake of fresh nutrients over cascade of self
and time feasible. From room to room
sieving yesterday from the silt of today
straining now from the white sands of tomorrow
still grains catch in the crevices
some lodge grating
some fall away
Reviews
“By its final poem, Put Your Hand in Mine has flashed us through no less than eighty-six scenes depicting family, friendships between women, toxic relationships, and the medicine of the urban natural world in what feels like Vancouver, not directly…” >>
— Danielle Janess The Malahat Review
“The speaker within Elaine Woo’s second full-length collection is pretense-adverse, is PC-adverse. Rather than conform to social dictates, she risks candidly addressing the theater of the personal and the social. This speaker raises her voice to systems designed to create…” >>
— Jami Macarty The Maynard
“Elaine Woo’s journey from young childhood to gray hair is told with a close connection to the natural world, even as it succumbs to environmental degradation. She is a relentless observer who gives the reader unique perspectives on such homely…” >>
— Rachael Ikins Snapshots - Don't Die Press
“Vancouver poet Elaine Woo’s first collection, Cycling with the Dragon (Nightwood Editions, 2014), had an often whimsical tone, but despite the poems that focussed on joy and the solace offered by notebooks and creative acts, the persona of this first collection struggled…” >>
— Kim Trainor Prism Magazine
“Clawing from the bottom of a well at the unforgiving stone walls of materialistic society's demands, Elaine Woo gazes longingly toward the natural world. The pressures placed upon women surface, revealing an image of malcontent that can be merely as…” >>
— Sarah-jean Krahn Broken Pencil
“There is no shortage of poems or poetry collections about the natural world, but Elaine Woo’s Put Your Hand in Mine renders nature unfamiliar, sometimes even frightening, and nonetheless a vehicle for human experience. Sensory details, all necessary but not…” >>
— Ren Iwamoto ARC Poetry Magazine