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.

In We're Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarah's new poems move with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, but the tone is considerate and meditative, resulting in poems of quiet awe at the human experience. Sarah's newest collection shifts with ease between various perspectives: from the first to the third person to a collective we. Each poem is a lit room for the reader to look into: "lit room to lit room."

We're Somewhere Else Now is essentially a collection that chronicles the COVID lockdown, tracking empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons for continuing to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the 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 is the author of twelve poetry collections, including My Shoes Are Killing Me, winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for poetry and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for poetry. She has also published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a music memoir. She served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books from 2010 to 2020. Robyn Sarah lives in Montreal.