It's my pleasure now to introduce Katie Farris.
At the heart of Katie Farris's most recent book,
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive,
is an argument in favor of writing
love poems despite the reality of a burning world around us.
Farris's assertion rises from a deep familiarity with suffering.
Subtitled A Memoir in Poems, Standing
in the Forest of Being Alive follows Farris's experiences
through stage III breast cancer, chemotherapy, mastectomy,
radiation, heart failure, and through all, survival.
The burning world Farris writes of
is also America in the time of pandemic and insurrection.
It is the America of gun violence,
of money, of health insurances denying coverage,
and impersonal voice over the phone
pronouncing devastating news.
"This world is on fire, still all around us, near and far."
From these contexts of personal and widespread struggle,
Farris writes, "One must train oneself to find,
in the midst of hell, what isn't hell."
This is the spark of Farris's poems.
This is what leads to her fierce,
tender lines that embody a training of attention,
to see joy, and to offer love back to what burns.
Farris trains her attention and our attention
through it to the transcendent and absurd joys of the everyday.
There are love poems for her husband, for her body,
for a purring cat, for Emily Dickinson.
They are set at home on the front porch
and in bed, in the oncologist's waiting room,
and in the long waiting for scan results.
Farris's poems also move through dream-like landscapes
of enormous trees and soul-piercing light.
Her first book, titled Boysgirls,
inhabits this world of dream and fairy tale.
At the book's end, she writes, "These are not stories
one can hand to another.
One must instead say, the story has been changed.
It is my body.
Eat from it and live."
This is what language can do in Farris's work.
We hear it and it can change us.
We offer it to others as a source
of life in the midst of a world on fire.
In addition to Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
and Boysgirls, Katie Farris is also
the author of three chapbooks.
She is co-translated books of poetry
from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian.
She is a professor of creative writing at Princeton.
Please join me in welcoming Katie Farris.
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