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It's my pleasure now to
introduce Katie Farris.

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At the heart of Katie
Farris's most recent book,

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Standing in the
Forest of Being Alive,

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is an argument in
favor of writing

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love poems despite the reality
of a burning world around us.

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Farris's assertion rises from a
deep familiarity with suffering.

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Subtitled A Memoir
in Poems, Standing

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in the Forest of Being Alive
follows Farris's experiences

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through stage III breast cancer,
chemotherapy, mastectomy,

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radiation, heart failure,
and through all, survival.

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The burning world
Farris writes of

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is also America in the time
of pandemic and insurrection.

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It is the America
of gun violence,

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of money, of health
insurances denying coverage,

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and impersonal
voice over the phone

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pronouncing devastating news.

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"This world is on fire, still
all around us, near and far."

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From these contexts of personal
and widespread struggle,

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Farris writes, "One must
train oneself to find,

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in the midst of hell,
what isn't hell."

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This is the spark
of Farris's poems.

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This is what leads
to her fierce,

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tender lines that embody
a training of attention,

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to see joy, and to offer
love back to what burns.

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Farris trains her
attention and our attention

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through it to the transcendent
and absurd joys of the everyday.

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There are love poems for
her husband, for her body,

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for a purring cat,
for Emily Dickinson.

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They are set at home
on the front porch

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and in bed, in the
oncologist's waiting room,

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and in the long waiting
for scan results.

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Farris's poems also move
through dream-like landscapes

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of enormous trees and
soul-piercing light.

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Her first book,
titled Boysgirls,

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inhabits this world of
dream and fairy tale.

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At the book's end, she
writes, "These are not stories

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one can hand to another.

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One must instead say, the
story has been changed.

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It is my body.

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Eat from it and live."

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This is what language
can do in Farris's work.

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We hear it and it can change us.

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We offer it to
others as a source

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of life in the midst
of a world on fire.

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In addition to Standing in
the Forest of Being Alive

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and Boysgirls,
Katie Farris is also

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the author of three chapbooks.

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She is co-translated
books of poetry

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from the Ukrainian, French,
Chinese, and Russian.

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She is a professor of
creative writing at Princeton.

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Please join me in
welcoming Katie Farris.

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[APPLAUSE]

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