In her uncompromising follow-up to 2012’s Sympathy Loophole, Jaime Forsythe offers a breathless cascade of evocative somethings: mysterious sounds, faint rumblings, biographies real and imagined, tabloid rumours, nagging memories, an animal stirring, a baby waking, a storm threatening, an escape hatch beckoning, and an inexplicable machine coughing into motion somewhere in the distance. The poems in I Heard Something comprise a surreal menagerie — funny, chilling, tender — of what it is to be a human at this very minute. Cup a hand around your ear as you read this book — it’ll enhance the experience.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR “I HEARD SOMETHING”
“Jaime Forsythe’s I Heard Something is a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s an arcing Tesla coil, a sparking lightning rod, a fine-tuned high-frequency reverb with escape velocity, and a gyroscopic field guide for living. This hypnagogic concatenation of poems surges with omens and prognostications, and deftly rewires our neural pathways.”
— SANDRA RIDLEY, author of Silvija
“In Jaime Forsythe’s superb new book, the view is intimate yet global, our lives populated by objects, by intimations, by the poetry of the uncanny every day, the everyday uncanny, by the body, the self, touch-screen lungs, children, motherhood, the poetry discomfiting and comforting, witnessing and consoling. How do we frame our lives, our experience, against the splendid and bewildering flood of words? Forsythe has heard something. It feels electric to listen to what she has found.”
— GARY BARWIN, author of No TV for Woodpeckers
WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAY:
“a dream quality permeates the book, as if you were to find yourself suddenly behind the eyes of someone else, a la Being John Malkovich. It’s funny; it’s a bit terrifying; it’s very weird. … I Heard Something is an experience—a thrill, a shiver up your back—not easy, but well worth exploring.”
— THE COAST (Halifax)
A Feed Dog Book / An Imprint of Anvil Press / Imprint Editor: Stuart Ross
Jaime Forsythe’s first collection of poetry, Sympathy Loophole, was published by Mansfield Press in 2012. Her poems have appeared in The Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Public Pool, Minola Review, This Magazine, NewPoetry, and more. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
