Standing in the Forest of Being Alive

'Katie Farris is brilliant in her imagining of survival and depends on the music of language as proof, “a language I can read/this scene has a door/I cannot close I stand/within its wedge/I stand within its shield.” Standing In the Forrest of Being Alive is an enchanting book of poems that question and praise the body even as it deteriorates. You are holding in your hands words that come across as chants, as spells, as prayer.'
Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Tradition

‘Katie Farris’s debut collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is frank and vivacious, weaving out of the complexity of life an argument for life.’ ALHS, PRISM international

‘These poems are coy and sexy, work as memoir and lyric, engage rhyme and rhythm, insulate within the poetic world and engage outside with nature. They are funny, too… [“To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest”] creates a layering of the language of medicine with the language of poetry, across the body of the speaker… that language, and poetry, is both an act of creation, and a breaking down; to make something new of the diagnosis; to find a path forward to hope.’ SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon

‘Katie Farris delivers her memoir in poems with generosity of spirit and stunning lyrical dexterity.’ Wanda McGregor, Dundee Review of the Arts

‘What allows this What Would Root to feel like a crowning of the collection, despite its newfound obliquity, is the way in which it is relayed through the kind of colloquial directness which has characterised Farris’s voice throughout, but which now stands out more starkly… it’s still a delight to return to these lyric priorities.’

Jack Belloli, The Poetry Review

‘Farris, in this incisively gorgeous collection, provides an antidote to overwhelm and division – let go, and find yourself everywhere you weren’t.’

Aliyah Begum, Poetry London