Standing in the Forest of Being Alive

Katie Farris

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781949944235
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
• Tell It Slant
• When You Walk over the Earth
• On the Morning of the Port Surgery
• In the Event of My Death
• The Man You Are the Boy You Are
• If Marriage
• A Row of Rows
• In the Early Days of a Global Pandemic
• Finishing Emily Dickinson, First Deacon in William Blake’s Church of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in the Oncologist’s Waiting Room
• Outside Atlanta Cancer Care
• Eros Haiku
• An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy
• Rachel’s Chair
• The Invention of America
• Quid Pro Quo: A Dedication
• Pirate Haiku
• Emiloma: A Riddle & an Answer
• Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage
• A Week before Surgery, I Practice My Body
• I Wake to Find You Wandering the Museum of My Body
• Come to Me
• To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest
• Five Days before the Mastectomy, Insurrection at the Capitol
• After the Mastectomy
• Woman with Amputated Breast Awaits PET Scan Results
• Woman with Amputated Breast at her Mother-in-Law’s Grave
• Ilya, Orphaned, after the Bough Fell through Our Roof
• The Wheel
• Woman with Amputated Breast Returns for her Injection
• Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
• Irony
• Scheduling the Bone Scan
• Contrition
• In the Shadow of This Valley
• Said the High Priestess to the Magician
• Against Loss
• To the God of Radiation
• Ice for Me
• What Would Root
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author