His poems include motifs like childhood memories, love, landscapes and dreamworld, and in his last collection of poetry also his personal death and mankind's sufferings.

[2] Sarkia was born in the municipality of Kiikka, Satakunta in southwest Finland as an illegitimate child of the maid Aleksandra Sulin.

Sarkia learned French and German in Tyrvää, where he lived by the local pharmacist whose wife was born in Switzerland.

In Helsinki Sarkia lived in cheap accommodation, suffered from poverty and was hospitalized several times for the tuberculosis he caught during the military service.

The second collection, Velka elämälle (″The Debt to Life″) in 1931, included the poem Antinous, which dealt with homoerotic love.

[2] In December 1933 Sarkia had a job at the university library in Turku, where the chief librarian was the writer Volter Kilpi.

In the early 1943, Sarkia lived a couple of months in the small village of Sysmä, but moved soon to Helsinki, as the state granted him a pension.

At this time, Sarkia was already seriously ill.[7] His fourth book, Kohtalon vaaka (″The Scale of Fate″) came out the same year, in the middle of the World War II, when Finland was fighting as an ally of Nazi Germany.

[10] Among the poets he translated were Arthur Rimbaud, François Villon, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

[9] Sarkia's translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal has been praised of its rich imagery and rhythmical experimentations.

In 2008, the literary magazine Poetry Salzburg Review published some English translations by Pentti M. Rautaharju, a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

[13] In 2010, the artistic residence Villa Sarkia, run by the literary society Nuoren Voiman Liitto, was opened in Sysmä.