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Standing in the Forest of Being Alive Spiral-Bound | 2023-04-04

Katie Farris

★★★★☆+ from 31 to 100 ratings

$19.59 - Free Shipping
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."
Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 100 pages
ISBN-10: 1948579324
Item Weight: 0.2 lbs
Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.3 x 8.3 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 31 to 100 ratings

A Rumpus Poetry Book Club Pick for April 2023
Recommended by Library Journal
Featured in The New York Times' "Newly Published"
Recommended by Buzzfeed

"I read this while my infant daughter moves her legs back and forth with joyful and energetic jubilation as she looks up to the mobile above her. She, like Farris, seems to pant, "life, life, life." It is summer and I am surrounded by life. Holding my tiny, red daughter in my arms, holding Farris' poems in my throat, I, too, only want to live."
--Alexis David, North of Oxford

Katie Farris is brilliant in her imagining of survival and depends on the music of language as proof, "a language I can read/this scene has a door/I cannot close I stand/within its wedge/I stand within its shield." Standing In the Forest of Being Alive is an enchanting book of poems that question and praise the body even as it deteriorates. You are holding in your hands words that come across as chants, as spells, as prayer.
--Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Tradition

"This is a speaker who is offering love because she can't not. These poems about cancer and romance and America exist not to invite personal sympathy, but because the speaker herself is also exploring the reason behind her own curiosity toward them. Like Roger Ebert wrote, it's the how--the way that Farris approaches the page with wonder and humor and love, despite life's ugly circumstances--that makes this book remarkable."
--Laura Candler, Good River Review

"Farris crafts sensual love poems, such as "Eros Haiku," that at first glance might seem at odds with the illness theme of the work but in fact affirm sensuality despite physical scars."
--Rebecca Foster, The Rumpus

"Memoir though they may be, these poems are breathy and roomy, a tickle up the spine, resembling in their ache and humor all that I appreciate about Japanese haiku: how saying little can say so much, and how a metaphor happens through keen observation. … No dry desert bones are to be found here. These bones live, one way or another, on this earth, in her lover's joy and memory, through these poems."
--Kimberly Ann Priest, The Harvard Review Online

"Farris finds refuge in the seasons and in the fragile natural world. Through its ruminative urgency and Farris's keen observations, this collection puts the world into sharp and wondrous focus."
--Publishers Weekly

"To read Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is to be wound in stories of intimate disbelief. From the cruel call announcing a cancer diagnosis to the image of a smooth cockroach on the tongue, events and images leap out from the book's sensual yet disembodied world. Readers will embrace the erotic and the ethereal. The collection engages the senses and refuses to let the body go quiet, even in its apparently passive role as a cancer patient. It is a collection to return to, filled with images and questions that linger."
--Elisa Rowe, The Massachusetts Review

"Eyes ablaze, Farris stands inside these poems, leaning her weight against the point where death and life meet, where life and death stand so close that the page would catch fire if they spoke an additional word. The poet picks up her pen. The forest may burn, but the poem will remember every minute."
--Alina Stefanescu, World Literature Today

"Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a brilliant debut, reasserting Farris as a rare and important voice in American poetry. She balances grace and strength perfectly, offering poems that will linger with readers for days at a time. This is a collection that readers will return to repeatedly, in times of crisis and in times of love."
--Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

"One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell, Farris writes in her poem "The Wheel"--For instance, the way you folded love into a booklet/and gave it to me to read. If such a lyric art is possible, of finding one's way through the inferno of cancer survival, of writing despite and with the body, commending to paper the luminous terror of having come through, these pages would be an account of that love, folded into a booklet. Brava!"
--Carolyn Forché, author of nationally acclaimed The Country Between Us

"The language fresh as a peach, honest, precise, imaginative full of life: in the midst of shock and pain, this book rings with love of language."
--Rae Armantrout, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Versed

"Farris writes a gorgeous self-elegy: "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." She provides an account of the dailiness of illness, long after the visitors disappear. With signature wit, Farris engages in a power struggle with mortality and in the end, her ferocity and conviction win through language that sings."
--Victoria Chang, author of the nationally acclaimed Obit



Katie Farris' work appears in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, McSweeneys, Granta, The Believer, Poetry, Poetry London, American Poetry Review and has been commissioned by MoMA. Her poems have received Pushcart Prize, The Beloit Poetry Journal's Chad Walsh Prize, and Anne Halley Poetry Prize, given by The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (Beloit Poetry Journal) and boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. Her own writing has been translated into numerous languages, including French, Ukrainian, Spanish and Russian. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books) is her first collection of poetry.