Yield

in the garden, you intoxicated on a towel, kicking

cooing in the clover, crickets insistent in skittering
heat. Letdown and foxes line the perimeter, perk

their ears with appetite. Letdown and every burner
left on high, door bolted from the inside.

In her third collection, Nova Scotian poet Jaime Forsythe has created an unforgettable long poem with Yield. In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum void from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea, and between being lost and being found, grows thinner. With repeated waves of couplets Forsythe brings the reader unforgettable images: a pom-pom that hardens into a sea urchin, an underwater dance club, a coast that melts into the sea. Delicately tracing the disorientation and dark edges of new motherhood, this is a collection that embraces beauty and ambiguity with a baby that roots for milk while what’s ancient – whether history or memory – floods in.