Robyn Sarah

Nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in PoetryIn 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.

Shortlisted for the J.I Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-FictionA poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost. After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

The first substantial selection of award-winning poet Robyn Sarah's poems in twenty-five years, Wherever We Mean to Be spans her entire forty year career. Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, and seemingly effortless in their musicality, her poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience and mortality.

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for Poetry Winner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry In My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous ...treasurehouse" that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets. Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous collections. Ten of her poems have appeared on The Writer's Almanac, and her work has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001).

Robyn Sarah is a poet of variousness and formal acuity, and Digressions is very much about both of those things. The prose poems, collage poems, and sketches collected here -- many for the first time --"represent forays down side roads I have explored from time to time", as she writes in her foreword. At last, readers can begin to put together the wider vision of her writing, as Digressions gathers her more experimental pieces in one place, allowing us a closer look at this other side of Sarah's work.

Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts - from the lyrical to the rhetorical, from the public and collective to the personal and private - the poems in Pause for Breath are a meditation on the times and on time itself, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.

A reader-friendly miscellany of essays, appreciations, reviews, and conversations, published in newspapers and literary magazines over the past ten years, these are pieces that will resonate equally with the lay poetry lover and the specialist. This collection explores all aspects of a life in poetry: reading it, writing it, teaching it, editing it, publishing it, reviewing it.

What a treat it is to read stories that do not seek to reduce the complexity of our lives or the ambiguities of our relationships, intriguing stories that are profound without being heavy. There are eight stories here, some very short, others long, and all worth reading, pondering and then rereading.