By Kylie Wilmarth, Poetry Reviewer
Katie Farris is a Pushcart Prize winning poet and professor best known for her memoir collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive. Her work often plays with hybrid forms, refusing to be confined by conventional writing standards. Along with her writing and teaching, Farris is also a translator. These experiences are all rolled up into this memoir and laid bare, like an autopsy of the self. Upon starting, I was immediately gripped by the sheer grief she had breathed into the verses. The reader is immediately thrust into the throes of Farris’s cancer treatment. You are not introduced. Farris is not in control as her body changes, her marriage changes, and the world around her changes in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and political unrest in America. Her mastectomy occurs alongside the January 6th riots, both leaving gaping scars. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a study on Farris’s body, changing and forming around those around her and what lurks inside of her. It contemplates eroticism and mourning and how to exist with them.
One can’t write about cancer without weight of mortality dragging down. Farris wonders about the Earth below her and when she will become a part of it. Her body is a morbid reminder of what is happening to her as her hair falls out and she sheds weight. She But we also see the vulnerable intimacies of the body, as she pretends to use her husband’s gout-riddled foot as a telephone or he pulls a hair from her hemorrhoid. The collection is riddled with intimate, vulnerable moments. It is so deeply personal that I felt embarrassed to read her undressing for surgery, like I was an intruder peeking into Farris’s hospital room. Like I wasn’t even supposed to be here. None of us should be watching this.
“At the oncologist’s office, a man stares. I stare back
until he says, “People must stare at you.”
Why bother closing a door
when everyone demands it open?
I go to the world with my tongue out
and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys
in the lock,
a six-inch scar instead of a nipple—
how can a watchtower hide?
I am well-positioned to seek out
fires and invading hoards—
my bald head the beacon the first
alarm.”
This poem, “After the Mastectomy”, made me absolutely burn in shame for even picturing the scene in my head. Who are we to watch as she is eaten alive? In “I Wake to Find You Wandering the Museum of My Body”, Farris defies all expectations of cancer patients as the poem mythologizes her body.
“Twenty-four Greek urns
Painted with wrestling boys
Comprise my spine.
Unusually well-preserved, my
Feet are the elaborate slippers
Of a beloved Chinese concubine,
Heavily embroidered
With vein and shadow.
My bald head? A lofty sunlit dome”
It would be remiss to wave off this memoir-in-poems as a bitter woman mourning her changing body, as is made clear in this poem. Farris’s body is not betraying her; it is just changing around her. It is dying and yet it is protecting her. It suffers through chemo and surgery, it allows her curl around her husband, it carries her through the world.
So many ideas are imposed on cancer patients on how to deal with their fate. On what their sickness means to them. But Farris does not allow her relationship with her body or her fate to be decided for her. This beautiful collection is not about cancer, diagnosis, or recovery. It is about love and eroticism and navigating the self. It is a love poem to Katie Farris’s body.