Yield

With Yield, her third full-length poetry collection, Jaime Forsythe crafts a luminous book-length lyric that unfolds less as a sequence of individual poems than as a sustained meditation on motherhood, ecology, and the permeable boundaries between body and world. Following Sympathy Loophole (2012) and I Heard Something (2018), Yield marks a striking evolution in Forsythe's poetics, allowing meaning to accumulate gradually through untitled clusters of verse that ebb and return like the tides surrounding the collection's coastal landscape. 

Situated within the liminal space of a house overlooking the Atlantic, Yield explores the disorientation of postpartum life through imagery that is at once dreamlike and deeply embodied. The domestic interior remains porous, continually infiltrated by the sea and the unconscious, until distinctions between inner and outer worlds begin to dissolve. These surreal transformations mirror the altered consciousness of early motherhood, where identity becomes fluid and the familiar world acquires luminosity. Throughout the collection, Forsythe embraces ambiguity rather than resolution, allowing the ancient rhythms of tide and inheritance to flood into the intimate rituals of nurturing an infant who roots instinctively for milk.

As the collection unfolds, Yield expands beyond the personal narrative of motherhood into a broader meditation on geology, where the permeability of the maternal body mirrors the increasingly unstable boundaries of the planet itself. Human activity presses against ecological limits just as childbirth dissolves the boundaries between one body and another. Forsythe's poetry suggests that both motherhood and environmental crisis require new ways of understanding interdependence and care. The result is an elegant and quietly powerful collection that refuses to separate the intimate from the planetary, offering instead a poetics of continual becoming in which bodies and ecosystems remain inseparably entwined.

One of the collection's most evocative moments blurs the boundary between extinction and remembrance that struck me. “The eastern cougar was declared extinct, but/ all the aunts- steeped in mental equations/ at the window, or arcing a hammer over a trellis-/ have seen one, feline slink down a dirt driveway,/ flash between snaps of ballooning sheets, ruffled/ sky just before rain.” Forsythe transforms the elusive cougar into a figure of persistence, suggesting that what is declared lost may continue to survive. 

Jaime Forsythe is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections, Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012) and I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018), works that establish her as a poet deeply attuned to the psychological landscapes of perception and the subtle tensions of everyday life. Her poems and fiction have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals, including Arc, EVENT, Grain, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Ampersand Review, This Magazine, The Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Public Pool, Minola Review, and NewPoetry. Forsythe holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq. Her work is distinguished by its finely observed lyricism, emotional restraint, and careful attention to the quiet moments through which human relationships, memory, and identity reveal themselves.

My engagement with Wolsak & Wynn's catalogue has unfolded across a series of reviews that reveal the remarkable range of the press's editorial vision. In reviewing Alexis von Konigslow's The Exclusion Zone, I explored speculative fiction through the haunted landscape of post-Chernobyl, considering how ecological catastrophe and scientific ethics become intertwined with questions of fear, gender, and memory. Armand Garnet Ruffo’s The Dialogues turned inward, drawing upon philosophy, mythology, and conversation as poetic forms capable of interrogating grief and the human search for meaning. In Tim Bowling's The Capital City of Autumn, I examined a poetics rooted in landscape and seasonality, where the Canadian environment becomes both witness and participant in histories of personal and collective transformation. Each review revealed a different dimension of Wolsak & Wynn's catalogue while reinforcing the publisher's commitment to formally ambitious literature that asks readers to dwell within complexity rather than certainty.

That conversation continued through Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory, where science and memoir dissolve disciplinary boundaries to explore inheritance, ecology and the body's relationship to the living world. Ellen Chang-Richardson’s Blood Belies another register entirely, investigating lineage, femininity, and the enduring resonance of family histories through richly layered lyricism. More recently, Kyle Flemmer’s Supergiants expanded that trajectory into cosmological and philosophical space, where language stretches toward questions of creation and the vastness of both the universe and the self. Although these books differ profoundly in voice and aesthetic approach, they share an intellectual curiosity that has become characteristic of Wolsak & Wynn, a willingness to publish works that resist simple categorization while trusting readers to navigate their complexities with intrique.

It is within this literary continuum that Yield finds its place. I approached Yield with an awareness that Wolsak & Wynn consistently cultivates books that privilege sustained inquiry over resolution. Across its catalogue, poetry and literary fiction become spaces where ecology, philosophy, history, memory and identity intersect allowing individual works to speak not only for themselves but also to one another. 

Forsythe enraptured me to appreciate the ordinary, to find the sublime within the everyday.

“There’s/ something to be said for robust surfaces that serve/ up life, enable greenness and cyclical flowering,/ permit havens of wild shelter. To be a bed of dirt,/ a shell, a little white shed full of rakes. To be/ a treehouse built of nails and spare boards, hidden/ by curtains of leaves, furnished with torn kites,/ teacups brimming with twigs, a space children/ try and return to for the entirety of their tenures in the human orchestra-.”

In these lines, Forsythe elevates the humble textures of rural life into sites of wonder, reminding readers that belonging, imagination and renewal are often rooted not in grand revelations but in the quiet spaces we inhabit. The passage transforms ordinary objects into vessels of memory and reverence, suggesting that the deepest forms of beauty are cultivated through attention to the overlooked and the lovingly lived.

Thank you to Jaime Forsythe, Wolsak & Wynn and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.