I Heard Something by Jaime Forsythe
JESSICA ROSE
In “I Heard Something,” the eponymous poem in Jaime Forsythe’s second collection of poetry, I Heard Something, an unsettled narrator seeks the source of a sound.
It’s not a woodpecker, a city bus, a coffee grinder, or an insect in pain. It does not “bring to mind anything that might be emitted from the folds of a human, animal, or plant.” It persists, appearing only to the narrator, who remains devoted to living with it in peace “like a pet gerbil or benign mole.”
As the collection’s title suggests, sound plays a critical role in I Heard Something, Forsythe’s memorable follow-up to 2012’s Sympathy Loophole. Rain taps, bones crack, and wind thumps. However, all senses are acute in this evocative collection that seamlessly brings together poetry and prose. Through Forsythe’s expressive language, you can’t help but feel something on your skin or erupting in your eardrums. “Three daddy-long-legs skitter in the tub / of a two-and-a-half-star motel,” she writes in “Nothing’s Wrong,” an especially striking poem, which appears in the second section of the book’s three parts.
Like the collection’s title, many of the poems in I Heard Something are written in the first-person narrative, creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy. “I waded into a warm purple night, / witnessed fur growing around the base / of a telephone pole, but missed / the tossed Molotov cocktail / that made the papers the next morning,” writes Forsythe in her poem “What’s Unsolved as a Place to Rest.” We know little about the collection’s narrators, but we can’t help but hope that they emerge from each troubling situation unscathed.
In I Heard Something, Forsythe’s use of personification—a jar gulps, a bicycle pump wheezes, a jewellery box glints, and a house blinks—forces readers to see everyday objects differently and in unexpected ways. Rooted in familiarity, mysteries creep in the most common of places—a cuckoo clock and dirt in a garden among them. In the book’s third section, parenting is an elemental theme. “Words guard us / against unwelcome thoughts and shifty / visitors. Fragile alchemy gets a baby / to sleep, powered by the noise / machine from the bright chain / store,” Forsythe writes in her poem “Spells.”
Unnerving, yet tender, and at times even funny, I Heard Something is surreal yet deeply grounded by the everyday. It’s best read aloud, with Forsythe’s careful, clever
language on your tongue, delivering you abruptly into unforeseen scenarios. It’s a collection to not simply read; it’s one to experience.