Standing in the Forest of Being Alive: Art as a Means of Defiance and Survival in Katie Farris’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper analyzes Katie Farris’s poetry book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (2023), as a major study of survival, resilience, and the shifting power of language in the wake of personal and collective disasters. Farris’s work, produced throughout her fight against breast cancer and the COVID-19 pandemic, goes beyond the bounds of traditional confessionalist verse to elevate her public and private pain into a universal story of grief, love, and defiance. By employing broken syntax, rich imagery, and intertextual allusion to literary lineages, the collection presents a poetics of resilience, pushing readers toward complexity in both life and death. Farris considers love and language potent weapons against despair, emphasizing their necessity in turbulent times. This paper analyzes how her depiction of illness disrupts dominant narratives, therefore emphasizing the resilience of the body and writing as a weapon of empowerment. Furthermore, it highlights Farris's innovative poetic devices that further contribute to the emotional depth and complexity. The work becomes understandable from then on as the piece balances its struggles with death, helplessness, and hopelessness, giving readers a notion of how to joyfully and courageously deal with middle-ware life as it proves that Standing in the Forest of Being Alive works as a personal tale and a larger commentary on vulnerability and perseverance.