Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Shortlisted, TS Eliot Prize 2023)

Katie Farris
(Pavilion Poetry, 2023); pbk £10.99.

American writer, poet, academic and translator, Katie Farris delivers her memoir in poems with generosity of spirit and stunning lyrical dexterity, especially following a devastating cancer diagnosis. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, 2018 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review, and the 2017 Orison Anthology Prize in Fiction.

The inaugural poem, ‘Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World’, is set apart in a section all of its own, reflecting the resultant isolation of such a medical diagnosis. The first stanza answers the  rhetorical question, ‘why’, with a short sharp statement of survival:

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

The horrific simplicity of cancer is coined beautifully:

the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going–

In the final stanza, the title repeats, this time punctuated with a question mark which Farris answers with the refrain:

to train myself in the midst of a burning world[.]

The shift from ‘hell’ to ‘burning world’ is ingenious but also altruistic as it opens up the conceit from Farris’s singular experience of cancer and includes us all in the stark imagery as she gifts us with poems of love.

Poetic influences come to the fore in the second section with the Dickinsonian ‘Tell it Slant’. In the first stanza, the physical and spiritual pain and distress is layered deeply in imagery, metaphor and sound. The speaker is untethered yet not free as she ‘float[s]’ in the ‘MRI gloam’; the assonance wails gently before we are pricked by the cancerous ‘cactus’, and the emasculating loneliness, of being singled out: 

Carcinoma be damned–you make
a desert of all
of me.

The second stanza is blunt: ‘Have I said it slant enough?’, Farris asks, and shows us that there was no gradual dazzling of the truth:

 a stranger called and said,
 You have cancer. Unfortunately.
 And then hung up the phone.

The honesty of this collection is brutal but also noble. While Farris takes us on her defeminising[GL2]  cancer treatment, ‘[…] surrender[ing] [our] braid’ or  ‘[…] our bald head[s]’ or ‘[the] Zoldex shot/ […] one long needle, and right in the gut’ and ‘[the] defining role: Cancer Patient, Stage 3’,  we can hardly imagine the corporeal blows those of us who have been fortunate enough.

And what about intimacy and sex? Is this something we consider when we hear someone’s awful news? No, and why not? This is a surprise.In ‘If Marriage’, Farris broaches intimacy and there is pathos for the indignity of:

beg[ging]
your forgiveness
for asking
your assistance
unwinding that pale hair
from my hemorrhoid.

Here, the poem is deftly structured in such a way as to mimic the act itself. Yet desire is still present in ‘Eros Haiku’, as there is in the opening line of ‘An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy’: ‘I’d like some sex please.’ Yes! With delicious wordplay and cadence:

Philosexical, soft and
Gentle, a real
Straight fucking, rhymed
Or metrical [..]

The poem, ‘In the Early Days of a Global Pandemic’ addresses the calamitous handling of the pandemic by the Trump administration with lines which echo through ‘The Invention of America’, a poem, which conjures up Eminem’s White America, with ‘white’ dropped from the ever dwindling refrain that ends the first stanza with ‘America.’ Despite her personal crisis, Farris stands firm,

As an anti-capitalist act, I reflect your hierarchies of worth,
America–

Farris recreates a reverberation between the titular poem and the third section’s finale, ‘What Would Root.’  The opening lines shift perspective from ‘I stand in the forest of being alive:/’ to the ethereal, ‘Walking through a cathedral of oak trees/’. There is a sense of acceptance between ‘terribly lost’ and ‘I/ lay down beneath my own branches’.  Emotion rises to the throat as we learn that Farris ‘was no longer hungry/’. And there is peace as she: ‘nuzzle[s] into the earth, to drink.’

Wanda McGregor.