The Cancer Poetry of Katie Farris

 Katie Farris, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, Alice James Books, 2023

Katie Farris showed up on my doorstep the other day, with poetry she’d written about her experiences with Stage 3 breast cancer. It’s about time, I thought. Elizabeth Boleman-Herring put up a post about Farris and her book. It intrigued me enough to order a copy.

I was thankful because I’ve been dealing with Stage 3b prostate cancer that expanded locally for over two years, and my emotions and struggles have been all over the place. It’s a reciprocal cancer – 1 in 8 American women get breast cancer while 1 in 8 American men get prostate cancer.

I was tired of paging through the pamphlets my oncologist gave me that describes the life expectancies for every stage of the cancer, along with what treatments are usually tried, although it noted that everyone is different so they might not work in my case. What I wanted to read was not more grim statistics but the emotions of having cancer and finding hope as you go through the treatments. I wanted honesty and courage and insights. I wanted companionship with someone else who is walking this path day after day and is finding ways to survive, someone who knows that fear about dying, like cancer, “has teeth and eats.”

The poems are moving because they dare to speak the horror, the moments of despair when a test result indicates that chemo is going to be needed, or surgeons are going to have to go back in and cut out more flesh. They hold the anguish and terror of wondering if you are going to survive or need to begin packing your life away. They are direct, and this is what I need cancer poems to be.

I’ve been writing my own poems and essays about my cancer treatments and revising them through my writing group. Katie’s poems challenge me to be as blunt as the radiation and chemical therapies, the bone scans, PET scans, the anti-hormone shots, the loss of your body’s privacy, the worry about “uncertain death and certain damage.”

She includes poems about her loss of self-esteem as her long hair comes off, her muscles disappear, and she is trying to reclaim her body’s physical need to be touched gently and loved. There are poems about her relationship with her husband because cancer doesn’t just concern the patient, it also affects the people who care about us. Our relationship with our partner continues to evolve as we both try to cope with what the disease is doing now, what it might do in the future, and how we might have to rearrange our lives to handle the changes. There are poems about social issues, and rightly so, because the world does not stop moving and falling apart simply because our life has been paused by the unending tests and treatments. 

Tonight, two of her poems speak to me as I probe the darkness for meaning. “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World” and “The Wheel” both talk about looking for what isn’t hell when you are in the midst of the hell that is cancer. It is hard to feel joy and celebrate life when we are exhausted and our bodies are nauseous and battered by cancer. I need to “train” myself to look for what is still good and dig it out. Like Katie, what has helped me hold on to who I am as my body is being pummeled is walking in the forest behind my house and rooting myself into nature.

There are probably other poetry books that people have written about their cancer, and I confess that I haven’t gone looking for them. I treasure Julie Hungiville Lemay’s book The Echo of Ice Letting Go (2017) and Ilyse Kusnetz’s book Angel Bones (2019) as both women confronted the cancers that would take their lives. Both books were suggested by friends. Katie’s poems showed up on my doorstep at a time when I needed words to hold me in place because I didn’t know what my cancer was doing.

My one criticism is that I wanted more poems about her cancer journey. I imagine that she has many more that did not make this book. Perhaps the rest will appear in her next one.