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

Toronto poet Elana Wolff is the author of three collections of poetry, including You Speak to Me in Trees (2006) - winner of the 2008 F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry. Wolff is also co-author of Slow Dancing: Creativity and Illness, Duologue and Rengas (2008) and author of Implicate Me, a collection of short essays on contemporary poems.