Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, the debut collection from poet Katie Farris, has been rightly celebrated for the ways Farris explores her breast cancer in unflinching ways. But Farris's poems are also explorations of the whole body, often taking cancer as another lens through which to experience her physical self rather than the other way around. The title of "Woman with Amputated Breast Awaits PET Scan Results" indicates the concrete lived experience of the body with cancer, but the poem expands upon and contracts around that diagnosis and on the physical toll of waiting: "Help me to spell waiting? I forget. And whom/ can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live./ A stone, the waiting weights my body into stone:/ what's left, almost a palindrome." Repetition and word play combine to create a surprising effect: equal parts darkness and air, both the hummed tune and the steady drumbeat.
Besides the cancer, hunger and lust and pleasure over the dirt taste of beets are equally found in Farris's body, all evidence of the poet's effort "[to] train myself to find/ in the midst of hell what isn't hell." And, always, there is love and its intimacies: the lumpy mattress, the interrupted sleep, and the endless small arguments: "A pleasant row/ of rows, little tugs/ on the strings/ of our love,/ just enough/ to pull our days/ taut." Whether considering marriage or Emily Dickinson or the insufficiency of the American healthcare system, Farris's poems are similarly pulled taut, each one tangled and fully alive. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian