Sympathy Loophole

Jaime Forsythe

ISBN 13: 978-1-894469-74-6

$16.95 CDN/US
62 pp

This lively first collection, often both creepy and hilarious, serves up an image-laden universe — the sideshow we call home — where contortionists, womanizing ventriloquist dummies, and pickled sharks compete with the everyday for the mark’s hard-earned buck. Jaime Forsythe’s poetry is loaded with wit, mystery, surprise, and breathtaking juxtapositions — it’s a contemporary inventory of pop culture and human experience that proves the wacky and the poignant can share a seat in the same roller-coaster of a stanza.

“Grounded in the domestic world, Jaime Forsythe’s spare, yet storied poems immerse us in particulars: wax, egg cartons, swizzle sticks, sweatpants, thongs, ‘an earring/in the grass.’ Forsythe tells the familiar slant, full of startling revelations — ‘In each surprise, something/you already know.’ These are smart, personable, fresh, carefully crafted poems, and Jaime Forsythe is a poet I very much look forward to hearing more from.” — Jeanette Lynes, author of It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems

“Jaime Forsythe’s debut collection mixes contradictions: caution with wit, public despair with flippant dismissal, story with rumination. Hers is a kind of high-octane sadness. It’s exactly what Canadian poetry needs.” — Jacob McArthur Mooney, author of The New Layman’s Almanac and Folk