Standing in the Forest of Being Alive

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

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 humour 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 red violet cerulean handkerchief.

“'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 Forrest 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”

'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 Forrest 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

‘Katie Farris’s debut collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is frank and vivacious, weaving out of the complexity of life an argument for life.’ ALHS, PRISM international

‘These poems are coy and sexy, work as memoir and lyric, engage rhyme and rhythm, insulate within the poetic world and engage outside with nature. They are funny, too… [“To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest”] creates a layering of the language of medicine with the language of poetry, across the body of the speaker… that language, and poetry, is both an act of creation, and a breaking down; to make something new of the diagnosis; to find a path forward to hope.’ SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon

‘Katie Farris delivers her memoir in poems with generosity of spirit and stunning lyrical dexterity.’ Wanda McGregor, Dundee Review of the Arts

‘What allows this What Would Root to feel like a crowning of the collection, despite its newfound obliquity, is the way in which it is relayed through the kind of colloquial directness which has characterised Farris’s voice throughout, but which now stands out more starkly… it’s still a delight to return to these lyric priorities.’

Jack Belloli, The Poetry Review

‘Farris, in this incisively gorgeous collection, provides an antidote to overwhelm and division – let go, and find yourself everywhere you weren’t.’

Aliyah Begum, Poetry London

Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, which was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023, and is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). Most recently she is winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, most recently, The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear, Translations of Lydmila and Boris Khersonsky. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

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