We’re Somewhere Else Now

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We’re Somewhere Else Now

By (author): Robyn Sarah

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 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 empty, desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the call of the birds.

AUTHOR

Robyn Sarah

Robyn Sarah is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently My Shoes Are Killing Me, winner of the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry. She has also published two collections of short stories and a book of essays on poetry. A dozen of her poems have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac.

Reviews

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 handWherever We Mean To Beshowcases her gifts her visual clarity nononsense voice compressed language rhythmic prowess and metaphoric agility These qualities speak from a longcultivated focus and bespeak a writer who pays fierce attention to the basic fact of being in the world

Anita LaheyThe 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