Standing in the Forest of Being Alive – A Memoir in Poems

by Katie Farris

Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life―even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question "What isn't hell?" and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a "redvioletcerulean handkerchief."

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Grief, Disability

58 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2023

About the author

Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011), a hybrid form text. The book has been lauded as “truly innovative,” (Prague Post), “a tour de force” (Robert Coover), and “a book with gigantic scope. At some points it reads like the book of Genesis; at others, like a dream-turned-nightmare. From the opening lines the author grabs you by the throat.” (Louisville Courier-Journal).

Katie Farris’s poetry, fictions, and translations have appeared in various journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Farris is also the co-translator of several books from the Russian, French, and Chinese. Her co-translation of Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010), was reviewed by The New York Times “words flicker — strange, elegant — a Russian evanescence. Heat lightning pulses between her lines.” Morning Ploughs the Winter, a book of prose poems by Acadian poet Guy Jean, was published by Marick Press in 2013 and nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Farris won the 2012 DJS Translation Award from Poetry East/West for her co-translations in New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012. Her translations have also been widely anthologized in texts such as New European Poets (Graywolf Press) and Penguin Book of Classical Russian Poetry (Penguin).

With Ilya Kaminsky and Valzhyna Mort, Farris co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Prose by Russian Modernist Poets, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2015.

She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at San Diego State University, where she won an Innovation in Teaching Award in 2013. She also teaches at New England College‘s low-residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Navigating illness of the self and illness of the planet and society at once. Brilliant and precise, oh my god.

[Hannah Showalter · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was really good!! some of the poems didn’t really hit for me, but the ones near the end had some banger lines. i would definitely read more of her work!!

[Sayantani Dasgupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, luminous poems. I’ll forever think of “Rachel’s Chair” as the greatest poem in this collection and beyond. I’m struck by the image in the poem “In the Event of My Death,” where Farris writes, “I will need a rope to let me down into the earth. I’ve hidden others strategically around the globe, a net to catch my body in its weaving.”

[hiend · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars!

i’m doing a powerpoint on one of the poems in this wonderful collection due to the fantastic way it depicts the experience of living with cancer but still not letting get in the way of things that mean a lot in life. challenging the cancer, fighting it and loving despite it all. the author herself discusses the three types of poem: cancer poems, love poems and america poems. the america poems are still just as harrowing with today’s events.

a wonderful collection!

[Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐ 3.5

Thank you, grief -
whose root is love - and love
which has teeth, and
eats.

[Tyler Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, I heard Farris read much of this collection out loud with her added context and was so enamored by it. Cannot stress enough how good this poems are. Personals favorites: Rachel’s Chair & To the God of Radiation

[Emily Cinquemani · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is so challenging to write short poems, and I am stunned by Farris’ ability to work so much emotion and thought into these poems. The brevity itself leaves space for the mystery this collection reaches towards.

“Why write poetry in a burning world? / To train myself in the midst of a burning world / to offer poems of love to a burning world.”

I wish I had her capacity for language and ability to attune myself to miracle and mystery, even in the middle of great suffering.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, haunting memoir in poems about breast cancer against the backdrop of the pandemic. Poem titles include "The Invention of America" (which I found especially powerful), "To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest," and "Five Days before the Mastectomy, Insurrection at the Capitol." The one I'm going to hold onto most, write down lines from and tack them above my desk, is the first in the collection: "Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World":

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Without the waiting, who can know when spring will come, or snow? / Heading south, the geese all beat the waiting with their wings."

- Woman with Amputated Breast Awaits PET Scan Results

i had really high expectations for this book as a fellow cancer survivor but i sadly found the poems hit or miss!

[Sarah Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning études in the key of cancer. It's also poetry about way more than cancer: erotics, surrender, protest, repair. She writes in "The Wheel": "One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell, / what isn't hell."

[Catherine S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and vivacious and true. Highly recommend.

[tillie lefforge · Rating 4 out of 5]

love the simultaneous simplicity and cleverness of katie farris’s poems

[Veronique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emotional, heartbreaking, thoughtful, beautiful.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A memoir in poems.”

Devastating and exhilarating.

[Sam Dolph · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant, moving, readable, engaging--just a really good poetry memoir that explores what it feels like to be in a "failing" body while also very much being alive.

If Marriage

If marriage
is a series
of increasing
intimacies, a slow
sweet collapse into
oneness, I
would still beg
your forgiveness
for asking
your assistance
unwinding that pale hair
from my hemorrhoid.

[Margaret Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katie Farris's collection Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a true memoir in verse. The collection begins with the incredible poem "Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World" which sets the tone for the entire work. It tells you that Farris is committed to using her work to process the unfathomable: obtaining a diagnosis during a pandemic at the height of reckoning with the violence of racism. "Why write love poetry in a burning world?/To train myself in the midst of a burning world/to offer poems of love to a burning world." My read of this is that Farris is conquering the identity stripping aspect of a very serious diagnosis by doubling down on her poetry. Perhaps she works to protect herself from the brutality of illness by offering work that can be respite from the brutality of the world. That's my favorite kind of poem: those that offer a brief little shelter from the sh*tstorm of the world. I'm here for it.

Many of Farris's poems have a true lyricism to them. In "Tell it Slant" Farris is taking direction from Emily Dickinson's adage "tell the truth, but tell it slant" to tell the truth of her specific diagnosis. I love this poem because it challenges the concept of slant. It becomes almost perpendicular, a joisting rod. The juxtaposition of the lyricism of the first stanza (finding musicality in her specific diagnosis) with the harshness of the method of diagnosis "a stranger called and said/you have cancer. Unfortunately/and then hung up the phone" creates tension that Farris doesn't let go of for the entire collection.

Another thing I really enjoyed in this collection was the variety of form. Short poems mix with longer poems, lyric poems mix with those that are more direct. The variety in line length for tightness predominates, which helps keep this collection moving (especially given its subject matter). I suspect that Farris understands that the potential audience for this collection isn't just poetry fans, but patients. Potentially, it is patients on chemo who may need their poems a bit blunter, a bit quicker, a bit easier on the reader for the brain fog associated with chemo and cancer treatment.

I especially loved the poem "Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage." First, its universal in its feelings of bewilderment of the lack of logic involved. Second, it really digs into the concept of identity and worth that can be stripped away by all of the bureaucracy involved with health care.

I also loved this same collaging effect in the poem "To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest" to which she gives co-writing credit to the doctor writing the path report. Creatively, its so deft. On a larger scale, it really stands as something begging for the humanity to be reintroduced to medicine.

Finally, I loved that Farris ended the collection with an absolute wild ride of a poem on rootedness. I think she fully understands how books and literature are a life line during cancer (or any other serious illness) because of the isolation of treatment. That this is done through humor, editorial choices on poem placement (shorter poems in the middle of the collection, longer at the end), and through spiking the entire collection with tiny moments of beauty and shelter, sets this collection aside from others on the topic. Actually, it sets this collection aside from pretty much anything else written on the topic at all!

This isn't a standard toxic positivity collection of 2 cent contemplations on hope and strength. It is clear that the aim was to be a memoir, one that offers a slice of a person's life offered for a very specific experience of meaning. Farris isn't offering hope or strength or "you go girl!" bs to other breast cancer patients. Instead, this collection is almost an instruction manual on how to survive the day to day. She begins the collection by telling us the struggle: "This scene has a tune/a language I can read a door/I cannot close I stand/ within its wedge/ a shield." And she closes by letting us know that the struggle is over in the final poem "What Would Root." There she describes in a slow unfolding, the experience of a speaker who is connected to every thing, hairs becoming roots and thoughts spilling into a willing ground. It is the end of isolation and irrationality. "Soon I crested/ a rise; the land spread itself greenly for me and I/wished I had a seed to toss into that green, just to see/what would root."

I would have given this another star, but there was something a bit off in a few of the poems that relied heavily on allusion. I absolutely understood the idea of Dickinson references as intertextual (nature, isolation, the rationality of natural science). The other allusions sometimes made me feel a bit ignorant, which took me out of the flow of the poems.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm venturing out of my grooved, comfortable zone of reading genres and trying out reading poetry. I have resisted it most of my life, but have hung around folks who write poetry more this year, and have had a poem leak out of me (quite surprisingly). So I thought I would visit this genre and see what happened.
If you would have asked me last year, I would have likened my avoidance of poetry to my aversion of playing the card game of Bridge. That it's way to much work for me, to be considered fun. And poetry? It was work, instead of that wonderful escape into, say, a murder mystery.
So I'm dabbling. As usual, I don't recall where I heard about this memoir, via poetry, of this author's journey with breast cancer. I like the memoir genre, so I thought this could be a transition book.
But here's what my first impressions are of reading poetry. It can be a pleasureable read, but when I am innocently reading, it suddenly zings me, knocking something loose in my heart or soul, or both, that I didn't even know was loose! Dang!
Perhaps poetry books should have warning labels: "Caution, your heart and soul will be wrung out, hung out and come out different after you have entered these pages."*

Here's her introductory poem. Hang on.

Why Write Poetry in a Burning World
Page 1

To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn't hell.

The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch set the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going--

This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.


My rating is about how much it touched me. But, isn't that what ratings are, anyway?

*Although the difference will probably be a softer, gentler you. Most likely, worth the venture.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This scene has a tune / a language I can read a door / I cannot close I stand / within its wedge / a shield.” Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, Katie Farris’ debut poetry collection, describes itself as “a memoir in poems”, and focuses on a period in Farris’ life wherein she is diagnosed with, and treated for, breast cancer — then, in the background, a global pandemic rages and the political arena is in turmoil. The first poem in the book, ‘Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World’, is its own mission statement: “To train myself to find in the midst of hell / what isn't hell.” Elsewhere, Farris dresses down America: “in America, / which is to say, everywhere — // Americans are spreading rumors, / writing about a country as if a country existed // in the midst of a global pandemic, about its citizens / as if we were visible, while America, which is an idea // in our grasp, twists itself into an eagle”. But the personal elements, as Farris finds salvation from illness and the burning world in love and desire, are the most luminous. I love the instant about turn in ‘An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy’: “I'd like some sex please. / I'm not too picky — / (after all, have you seen me? / so skinny you could / shiv me with me?)” And I love the spectacular image of the lover-as-magician,: “He *joys* me, reluctant, pulls / laughter, // that / redvioletorangecerulean / handkerchief, / slowly, / right / out of my / mouth.” Even though “no one living knows the grammar”, Farris sees much to love and hope for in the human body, “what's nameless inside our veins fluoresces, fluoresces in the rain.”

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poetry collection. A cancer memoir. A treatise on seeking love, desire, and beauty even when staring in the face of death. An exploration of how we still seek, must seek, life, even when our world is going up in flames. (This happens both personally for her, and is happening, as she writes, to the America of the early pandemic (and police brutality, and BLM protests), of the insurrection, of what has often seemed the last gasps of democracy over these past three years, has it not?) The very first poem explains the idea behind the whole group: "Why write love poetry in a burning world[?] / To train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn't hell."

This might really work for you if you are someone who struggles with poetry as a) this is a very succinct collection--I reread it twice on the same bus ride yesterday--and a lot of the poems are very compact and get quickly to the point; and b) it's super clear what she's talking about even when metaphor gets involved, whether it's cancer and imminent death, or love for her partner, or the dumpster fire of our country.

Farris is, I would say at least mildly, obsessed with Emily Dickinson and indeed there are some stanzas and poems that are so Dickinson-esque, I googled them to see if they were quotes, heh.

My favorites are:
The Man You Are The Boy You Are
Rachel's Chair
Emiloma: A Riddle & An Answer (I didn't realize until I read a review that Emiloma = Emily [Dickinson] + Carcinoma)
Come to Me
The Wheel
What Would Root (I looooove the imagery in this one so much)

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't a poetry collection, it's a memoir, it's a survivor song, it's a screaming fuck you to cancer that will make you think about time a little differently. The time you have left, the time you've wasted complaining about your petty woes, time that just keeps getting screwier and screwier, man.

What if the past
is a crouching tiger
and memory is the act
of putting your head
in its mouth?

This little banger inspired me to write about finding a piece of cheesecake in the men's room at JFK but that's not important. What's important is "To the God of Radiation," which asks "How much more can one body take?"

Seriously, how much? Do you know? Have you tested it lately? It's getting late and the scythe swiper is coming.

When I was on book tour this spring, I asked for this book in every bookstore I set foot in. "We don't seem to have it in stock, but I can order it for you?" they said. "Yes, please," I said, and then I left town. I ended up ordering it from Bookshop.org instead.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell,
what isn't hell."

This is an excellent collection that is Katie Farris's memoir in poetry of her cancer treatment and her responses to it. Not just as a poet, but as a human being. It isn't though a collection about death, although death itself and the fear of death is acknowledged often. It is a collection about being alive, which is why it has the title it does.

And being alive in all aspects, including the erotic.

Katie Farris opens a door into her private life that others might be uncomfortable doing but to recontextualise a couple of lines from After The Mastectomy:

Why bother closing a door
when everyone demands it open?

I found this a really excellent collection and I'm glad I read it. I think there's something reassuring in it for anyone who is suffering. It's a kind of pocket sized book of realistic reassurance.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Standing in the Forest of Being Alive could have been written on flashpaper, as each poem bursts alight with every page turn, and yet the words are also as indelible as a skin tattoo. Farris writes on the heaviness of living in a body being carved out by cancer. Still, these poems are so light in their breath that I feel I could gently lift one by its elbow and its feet would leave the ground.

The work is funny, tender (as in gentle but also like touching a bruise) and deeply sensual. Katie Farris is a wonder, and my heart is still humming even after finishing her book last night.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What is the door/ the bullet makes/ in the body?// America, the gun-/ predictable, mechanical,/ possessed of several chambers..." In "Standing in the Forest of Being Alive", Katie Farris expands on her chapbook, "A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving" (which I reviewed here, https://www.thelitpub.com/blog/review...), and adds a social/political dimension, resulting in a book suffused with urgency and vulnerability and brimming with humanity.

[Дарина Гладун · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katie writes sensual poetry, with vivid imagery. The poems' aftertaste is the aftertaste of an experience I can relate to, but through the frame of my own culture.
Being in a fragile state when uncertain time approaches, opening the door of the grave yet standing in the forest of being alive. The poet, who has gone through a metamorphosis, captured the mystery of becoming a butterfly in between her lines.

[Maryalene · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wasn't until I was half-done with the book that I flipped it over to see that someone (the publisher?) decided to define it as being about "erotic love." While there are a few poems about sex, that certainly doesn't seem to be the central theme to me. Instead, this a poignant collection of poems about one person's experience with cancer. Perhaps it's because sex sells, but it's a shame that this work's blurb has reduced it to erotica.

[devon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is coming from someone who is not a published author or poetry fanatic, but I thought it was alright. Didn’t really do it for me.
I liked how some of the poems discussed changes to the body and how that might affect your self-perception, in terms of sexiness and how you feel as a person. I think that’s a very real part of cancer that sometimes is overlooked. But some of the poems about sex felt cliche to me.

[Ruby Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

STUNNING, GO READ THIS RIGHT NOW. This is the poetry collection that houses "Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World", which has been my artistic manifesto this spring. That one is still my favorite, but the rest of the collection is also absolutely incredible. I can't stop thinking about "standing guilt-fingered before my heart's armoire, stroking always toward the grain."

[Julia Dasbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of such unfiltered tenderness amid bodily devastation. A book not ashamed to look at the self, and keep looking no matter what or who looks back. It's one to read again and again and keep finding more moments of light, more glimpses of love, and always in the most unnoticed places that Farris shows us with gorgeous lyricism.

[A.J · Rating 3 out of 5]

"One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell."

Yeah. Poetry normally is a hit or a miss for me and this was definitely a hit. I'm willing to give most things Hanif Abdurraqib mentions a try and I'm glad I gave this a shot. It was so....personal which I GET! Poetry! But sometimes I don't get it and this I GOT. So. Yeah. 3.5 stars

[Emily Mae Dilley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. The title of this collection is *chef’s kiss,* and there were equally beautiful moments within the collection as well. I wish I could better relate to some of the subject matter, but the author’s emotions come through in every line. I found this book as part of a book scavenger hunt with @undercoverbookclub and am glad I discovered it!