Yield, Jaime Forsythe
Wolsak & Wynn, 2026
The third full-length poetry title by East Coast poet Jaime Forsythe, following Sympathy Loophole (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2012) and I Heard Something (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/a feed dog book, 2018), is Yield (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2026), a collection constructed as a book-length accumulation of untitled, clustered poem-structures. Yield is less a collection of poems, say, than a single idea that reveals itself, slowly, one piece at a time, offering its title both as the result of what had been planted, and the suggestion of, if not to give in, but to be open, allow. “In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum voice from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea,” the back cover copy writes, “and between being lost and being found, grows thinner.” There is an abstract across Forsythe’s lyric, one through which better to articulate the space within, one might say. “Moon snail bores a hole / in the shell of its prey,” she writes, “husks to be strung / into jewellery once // sucked dry. Intertidal / empties littler the sand, // sharp on bare feet.”
Subtitled “a poem,” Yield floats as a singular, extended structure through a blend of ecopoetic and pregnancy/motherhood, articulating a sequence of meditative lyric fragments around fragility, ecologies and post-partum isolations. “Field interrupted by crop circles,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “wheat / depressed where I flatten to watch the drone // do its scenic capture, propellered eye / rolling over bivalves, tire swings, bald eagle // who waits out UFOs from a pine. I was saying / something when I came out here to lie down // in the path split through a paragraph of reeds, / egg-shaped structure in the distance, dropped // pendant a period.”
Her lyric is detailed, intimate and immersive; composed via an adherence to the accumulated couplets and line breaks, a structure clearly and carefully constructed, even across the more overt collision of words, words. “I paid to float in a tank of salt water / boasting ten times the salinity of sea. // At eight months along, I gladly gave up / gravity, invited exceptions to the accepted // theories. The bleached pod was dark and hushed / but for my own internal sloshing, and yours, // sealed away from diesel engine, perennial / siren, voice of crow. With credit, I could afford // submersion three times over forty-one weeks. / To abandon the world’s din for zero symphonic // decibels a luxury tinted with shame.” There’s a clatter to Forsythe’s lyric movement, seeking calm through the chaos, with a structure carved, perhaps, as a kind of scaffolding, all that might hold the subject matter together. With a clear eye, Forsythe’s lyric is at turns grounded while being ungrounded while impossibly ground down, attempting a clarity, perhaps, through the composition itself. “When blood volume balloons and abdomen / hardens,” she writes, near the end, “that’s a warning about endurance.”
Barrier of black spruce
orange sky threaded with
branches
over the crib’s
parenthesis
where you don’t sleep
on parading llamas
I wade into the temperate
quarry
bathing suit bunched,
stroke
the grey mirror
foil surface of joy
your wet wiggle
buttoned into polka-dotted
pyjamas a pearl
appears
on blushing gums
rob mclennan has a new poetry book out this month, edgeless, with Caitlin Press, and a chapbook out right now with Broke Press. Another chapbook is due soon with Subpress, his first of a supposed three, which is pretty cool, also.
