Elaine Woo

Elaine Woo is a poet, librettist, artist, and non-fiction writer.  Her work appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies including Sustenance:  Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Shy, and V6A:  Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Woo earned a BFA at the University of British Columbia. (photo courtesy of Elaine Woo)

Poetry

Cycling With the Dragon

Gibsons, B.C.: Nightwood Editions, 2014.
PS8645 .O475 C93 2014

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)

Cycling with the Dragon is a personal investigation of family, love, culture, self, and the helpless feeling of “smallness.” Elaine Woo’s poems take the form of the words that they speak: she forms an “o” for the buoy that is a child’s safety-raft (found in the solitude of a notebook and Harriet the Spy), and weaves a poem about fearing snakes and dreams into a descending slither.

Woo’s poems weave meaning with form, writing in a pastiche of diverse poetic voices who are small by virtue of age or status (be they women, children, ethnic minorities or the creatures of nature). And like tenacious seeds they break through to reach the sun, to face an abusive parent, bullies, the pain of shyness, envy, or racism.

Poetry

Put Your Hand in Mine

Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2019.
PS8645 .O475 P88 2019

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)

This is a book of the inner sea. Language, concept, and form alternate holding the depths. That broken diamond of sun on rough waters: she speaks egalitarian. That cool glass of viridian water just within reach of the surface: water daemons flit through meaning. Obeying the dictates of water, Put Your Hand in Mine guides us through a deep love of the world and all beings in it. It matters not, the pain, nor the broken flippers, nor the sting in old wounds. Reading this is a cleansing, a claim of survival against iron pleats of loneliness.