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

Book Synopsis

A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025 - 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 We're Somewhere Else Now

"We're Somewhere Else Now is a gravely beautiful collection, chronicling days 'spent and drying.' No poet has published anything close to it this year, and it confirms Sarah as one of our best."
--Carmine Starnino, The Walrus

"The topic of the poems in Robyn Sarah's We're Somewhere Else Now vary, though a number of them touch on the pandemic . . . Yet one of the book's projects is to find happiness, especially when it's not in plain view. And so We're Somewhere Else Now is full of moments when the poet translates loss into consolation"
--David Starkey, "The Best Poetry Books of 2025," California Review of Books

"Robyn Sarah's work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be, employing both high formalist rhymes and minimalist beauty. Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different."
--Chris Banks, The Woodlot

"Sarah's verse is an antidote to the soul's virus . . . Her diction seems so direct, but between the words and lines she meditates in musical nuance and wit to cast doubt on simple and complex truths."
--Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review

"This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah's ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems."
--Anna Roberts, The Tribune

"If our culture had any sense, these poems would be staples of anthologies and curricula. Forget Atwood or Anne Carson; you can build a canon out of Robyn Sarah deep cuts . . . Sarah has always been the real deal, a writer who can command attention with a paucity of words that's more interesting than any Instagram post."
--Jason Guriel, Portico

"This is a triumphant return from Robyn Sarah, and her first book of new poems in a decade. With her characteristic quiet wisdom, Sarah turns her attention to the pandemic years, capturing both the strangeness of isolation of that period, and the subtle beauty that persists in daily life."
--Open Book

"We're Somewhere Else Now marks a return to a voice both familiar and probing. [Sarah's] poems carry an ease of camaraderie, a voice to commiserate with, lightly."
--Paisley Conrad, Montreal Review of Books

"Sarah's 11th book of poetry offers the usual pleasing variety of form and subject matter . . . Sarah mixes detailed local observations with repeated reflective questions and quotations from both Biblical and Talmudic sources."
--Johann Nodrav, The New Quarterly

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.