dedicated to Kyle Marie Allard

Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris. Alice James Press, 2023. 50 pp. $18.95 (paper)

My fascination with Standing in the Forest of Being Alive began before I even turned to the first page. I was immediately arrested by the front cover: an outstretched hand gripping a thick, cleaved red braid–the poet’s real hair, cut off prior to starting chemotherapy for stage III breast cancer diagnosed just before her thirty-seventh birthday. And on the back cover I noted with anticipation that the collection is billed as a “memoir in poems.” It would be a disservice to not acknowledge my own stake in this description; like Farris, I have also been cast in the role of FEMALE PATIENT, attempting to turn the terrifying slog of chronic illness into hybrid memoir-poetry. And in my dual role as FEMALE PHYSICIAN, I covet illness narratives as a ballast against my own impatience and exhaustion working in a broken medical system. The third and most painful expectation I brought to Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is that in the liminal days between ordering the book and receiving my copy in the mail, one of my closest friends—younger even than Farris—was told by her oncologist that her breast cancer had progressed from stage III to stage IV. It is at this intersection of identities that I read Farris’ collection for the first time.

The book’s description as “a memoir in poems” suggests that it traffics in both autobiography and narrative. At first the collection seems to fit this description. The poems are clearly recounting personal experience—a fact I would take as given in the current milieu of contemporary poetry even without the tag of “memoir.” Though there has been a healthy reexamination in poetry circles about the appropriation of identities including race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, somehow illness-as-persona has often received a pass—see The Year of What Now by Brian Russell and I Know Your Kind by William Brewer as examples. Here Farris’ relationship to the speaker is clear; the stakes are high and the money on the table is real.

As to a commitment to narrative, Farris clearly tracks the chronological course of her illness, beginning in shocking banality on the book’s second page when she receives news of her diagnosis over the phone (“You have cancer. Unfortunately.”). The initiated among us are already dreading what must happen next: appointment after appointment, chemotherapy, mastectomy, hormone therapy, radiation. Farris faithfully places thumbtacks on her treatment journey with poem titles such as “On the Morning of the Port Surgery,” “After the Mastectomy,” and “Woman with Amputated Breast Awaits PET Scan Results.” But these poems, which make up just under half of the book, are less interested in a descriptive experience of these events than mapping the emotional landscape of loss, both actualized and threatened. These literal titles quickly accelerate into language more surreal, playful, and dark. In a poem titled “Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage” Farris begins: “I don’t know what money is,” before postulating various definitions of currency, treasure, and cash. She ends with this haunting image:

                    A heavy-bodied moth
caught between glass and screen casts its shadow     down
into the palm of my hand: one dark coin.

Farris, too, is trapped and her life (and likely her phone call with the insurance company) is on hold. From my experience on both ends of the stethoscope, navigating insurance coverage is truly an American brand of hell. Though three other poems in Standing in the Forest of Being Alive explicitly probe capitalism, the pandemic, and the Capitol insurrection, “Ode to Money” is by far the most effective indictment of our country’s politics. While the other American poems attempt to widen the lens of Farris’ “burning word” to a landscape outside the hospital, they deal mainly in abstractions and general gestures. In contrast, in “Ode to Money” systemic injustice and its consequences to the speaker are clear and devastating. The value of Farris’ body has been reduced by the American medical system to the smallest possible monetary amount: one single coin.

The image of the moth’s shadow has an echo in the ending of another cancer treatment poem, “Outside Atlanta Cancer Care”:

for if you long hard enough,
do you not find fruit
in your palms?

I return to this point of wonder.

Here longing itself is enough to conjure fruit (another form of currency) into one’s hand. I love this passive framing, which seems to simultaneously both absolve and implicate not just Eve but all women who hunger. Farris’ handling of female desire is, in fact, the driving force of this collection—much more than the literal narrative of her breast cancer treatment which, by its terrible and predictable nature, is unable to subvert reader expectation. This does not make Standing in the Forest of Being Alive NOT a “memoir in poems,” but this description is reductive and perhaps misrepresents the book’s objective.

Farris’ version of eros is a welcome relief from the two typical modes of discourse around breast cancer: hyper-feminization—neon pink ribbons emblazoned on shoes, billboards, football helmets—and hyper-sexualization—men wearing FREE BREAST EXAM shirts to benefit breast cancer research. Of course, the stripping of a woman’s sexual agency is not unique to breast cancer patients; since my diagnosis of Crohn’s disease at age fourteen I could fill a book with unsolicited sentiments about my desirability. In contrast, Farris’ depiction of longing is refreshingly subversive, particularly as it expands into craving not only flesh, but more time, more life (“And whom / can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.”). These love poems are often less explicitly “about” cancer, but are ultimately the most compelling. They offer up an intimacy despite—or perhaps because—of the threat of loss pressing against their edges. See one of the more perfect poems in the book, “Eros Haiku”:

Today, my apple
core sat on the countertop
waiting for your mouth.

Cleverly positioned immediately after “Outside Atlanta Cancer Care,” the “fruit / in your palms” has now been eaten. But instead of throwing the core away, it becomes a sensual gift for the beloved. The apple evokes the poet’s dreaded upcoming mastectomy, where her flesh will be carved by the scalpel’s teeth, leaving behind someone desirable, not disposable.

As more and more is taken from Farris, her poems become an exercise in desiring a wider variety of places, animals, and objects. “All things are erotic,” she writes, accruing beloveds: the sky, a hemorrhoid, a friend’s guest room chair, a cockroach, a handful of dirt. To write about desire is a means to more wanting, and to want is to survive. The very first poem of the book, “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World,” answers the title’s question as directly as a thesis: “To train myself to find in the midst of hell / what isn’t hell.” And notably the book’s conclusion, “What Would Root,” does not end with a declaration of cancer remission, but a walk through a forest where Farris drinks in the landscape—metaphorically and literally—with an endless thirst. When reading these poems of staggering yearning I received the greatest gift: feeling as if my dear friend with stage IV breast cancer was not several states away, but sitting next to me on the couch.

There are times in Standing in the Forest of Being Alive when the poems lose their emotional potency and I desire—there’s that word again—tighter language and surreal images that are more clearly rendered. The title poem, for example, begins with the speaker standing in the aforementioned forest, holding a book and an “aluminum pot of chicken stock” before moving abruptly into a description of walking through a cemetery looking for her own tombstone. In theory this scene has all the potential to stun us, but the poem ends puzzlingly: “a drizzle begins, / and what’s nameless inside our veins / fluoresces, fluoresces in the rain.” The images here have become imprecise, the logic of the poem too dreamlike and difficult to parse.

But when Farris is at her best she channels the intensely condensed language of Emily Dickinson—who is explicitly referenced throughout the book and, at times, briefly imitated—and the lucid surrealism of Charles Simic. One of my favorite poems in the book, “In The Event of My Death,” strikes this balance, ending:

In quarantine
I learned to trim your barbarian
hair. Now it stands always on end:
a salute to my superior barbary skills. In the event
of my death, promise you will find my heavy braid
and bury it—

I will need a rope
to let down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe,
a net to catch
my body in its weaving.

Hair is often a stand-in for vitality and losing it can be one of the most intensely dreaded costs of cancer treatment. Here the loss of the poet’s hair—forever suspended on the book’s front cover—takes on new life. Charon-like, her braid conveys her body downward after death into a lattice of the poet’s own making. There is such a powerful tenderness here, both for herself and her beloved. For those of us for whom death presses close, Farris has given words to our most ardent prayer for a soft landing.

We are lucky to live in a time when illness narratives have proliferated wildly in all types of media, from poetry to comic books. These stories offer up beauty, humor, and companionship; they teach us how to live, and perhaps more importantly how to die. We arrive at these narratives with our own broken bodies and love for others who endure terrible illness. As readers, we feel that the stakes are high. But they could not be higher than for the writer herself. Reading and rereading this book, I found myself profoundly grateful for these elegant and bravely intimate poems. If I am left wanting after this book concludes, it is only because I, like Farris, hunger for so much.