This lively first collection, often both creepy and hilarious, serves up an image-laden universe Ñ the sideshow we call home Ñ 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 Ñ 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.

Jaime Forsythe is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and journalist. She edited the Invisible Publishing anthology Transits: Stories from In-Between, and her writing has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including This Magazine, Geist, and The New Quarterly. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sympathy Loophole, will be published in Spring 2012 by Mansfield Press. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Jaime Forsythe's profile page

Grounded in the domestic world, Jaime Forsythe's spare, yet storied poems immerse us in particulars: wax, egg cartons, swizzle sticks, sweatpants, thongs, Ôan earring/in the grass.' Forsythe tells the familiar slant, full of startling revelations Ñ ÔIn 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.Ó (Jeanette Lynes, author of It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems)