I didn’t set out to write a long poem. Instead, Yield evolved as I kept returning to a voice that settled into a continuous rhythm, couplet after couplet. If a stanza is a room, I kept stumbling into new hallways, cupboards, and cellars I wanted to explore, all part of the same wind-beaten house.
I’m drawn to poetry, both as a writer and a reader, in part because I feel it gets closer to the truth of lived experience than, say, everyday speech. I love that poetry can hold leaps in time and logic, scraps of dreams and memories, impossible images, and music, all at once.
The postpartum year after my second child was born collided with the pandemic. This period made me hyper-aware of the stacked nature of time, the way that everything that has ever happened can be happening at once. Probably like many writers, I’ve lived a lot in my head, and the sheer physicality of giving birth and breastfeeding brought all the things my body has been through to the surface. I was humbled and comforted by staying close to the coastal landscape and thought a lot about its endurance, and the caretaking it’s had for thousands of years by its original inhabitants, the Mi’kmaq. Snails, lichen, and other forms of life worked their way into the poem and expanded the speaker’s interiority.
Working within the puzzle of language always feels new to me and I imagine I’ll never entirely figure it out.
Jaime Forsythe reads from YIELD
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Jaime Forsythe’s previous books are I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Arc, EVENT, Grain, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Ampersand Review and This Magazine, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and currently lives close to where she grew up in Nova Scotia/Mi’kma’ki.
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Yield is available here on All Lit Up, or from your favourite indie bookstore.
