Monstrance is Sarah Klassen’s best book to date. There’s a lot of spiritual resonance here, but it’s not abstract: it’s rooted in a keen sense of the world we live in. The long, rhythmically sophisticated lines have both an intellectual pressure and an emotional weight that illuminates the complex relationships Klassen explores between the familiarities of our prairie experience, and parts of the larger world she has traveled to and recorded with deep sympathy and attention. The subject matter, the range of attention, is ambitious, but carefully honed to a focus that sustains itself page after page.

-George Amabile, author of Dancing, with Mirrors

"These are carefully written poems....Klassen always impresses with her intelligence as well as her search for understanding."
-- Uptown

"Klassen has the ability to move from a simple observation...to wide-ranging considerations...[her] emotions...condense powerfully in a clear image."
-- Winnipeg Free Press

"... the delight of Montrance is Klassen’s radiant, assured voice, both for its remarkable immediacy and for the poet’s ability to make faith and inner realities relevant in ways that are neither sentimental nor superficial."
-- Herizons