We're Somewhere Else Now - by Robyn Sarah (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry

In her first collection of new poetry in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.

We're Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, "lit room to lit room," tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.

Review Quotes

Praise for Robyn Sarah

"As in her poetry, spare colloquial surfaces carry hidden depths . . . subtle and suggestive, working on several levels at once."
--Globe and Mail

"The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart... Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent."
--Montreal Gazette

"A poem by Sarah could fit into the palm of your hand . . . Wherever We Mean To Be showcases [her] gifts: her visual clarity, no-nonsense voice, compressed language, rhythmic prowess, and metaphoric agility. These qualities speak from a long-cultivated focus and bespeak a writer who pays fierce attention to the basic fact of being in the world."
--Anita Lahey, The Walrus

"So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience."
--Eric Ormsby

About the Author

Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General's Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.