Robyn Sarah – författare

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).

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.

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.

A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025 • 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. 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.

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.