In poems that contemplate human experience, Sarah Klassen charts the paths we travel in search of the tree of life. This quest for the nexus of spiritual fulfilment takes readers from the steps of ruined cities to perilous migrations, school playgrounds, and into dream. It laments injustice, and finds pause in nature and sacred rituals. With firm, guiding hands, Klassen leads the way across the tumult of existence in pursuit of an elusive Eden.

Born in Manitoba’s Interlake, Sarah Klassen learned at an early age to appreciate both birdsong and nature’s silence. An accomplished poet and fiction writer, she has won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (Journey to Yalta), the High Plains Award for Fiction (A Feast of Longing), the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry (A Curious Beatitude), and the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry. Her work has been nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, and the Aqua Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. The Witternbergs is her first novel. Klassen lives in Winnipeg.

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A call to compassion, The Tree of Life is oxygen for the weary-, and Klassen a prophet at the crossroads of our moment and the eternal. She invites us on a pilgrimage from primeval myth to dreams of paradise-through prairie picnics, temple ruins, across deserts alongside the displaced-into a place where the soul, though troubled, knows all manner of thing shall be well.

-Angeline Schellenberg, Fields of Light and Stone

Tuned to time-ancient, apocalyptic, and current, these poems sing of pilgrimage, from the Exodus wilderness to the Mennonite family road trip, from the refugee's flight to the soul's journey toward faith. Sarah Klassen writes with prophetic clarity as she draws from the rivers of myth, history, literature, and scripture. This is poetry bent on ascension, blazing with light, seeking with grit that tree of life whose roots drink deep from the waters of eternity.

-Carla Funk, Gloryland