Katie Farris
“One of the most exciting parts of being a writer during this time is the way that increasingly, mainstream culture is opening up spaces in language and in identity, creating continuums where people used to see only opposing ideas. Rather than boys are blue and girls are pink and never the twain shall meet, the mainstream is beginning to see a beautiful palate of purples entering their vocabulary.”
“The real genius of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is how Katie Farris’s poems orbiting her cancer continuously turn toward wonder, deep wonder made wise by having known profound suffering: “One must train oneself to find, in the midst of hell, / what isn’t hell.” The poems braid the incessant urgent demands of a sick body with the incessant urgent demands of a sick country, a dying earth. The effect is brilliant, vertiginous—but also kind of shockingly readable and, importantly, often really funny. Farris has given us a truly wise, unforgettable, delight-full book.”
“A wickedly inventive book, boysgirls is myth funneling into parables of self-recognition where the language is inventively spare, but tuned enough to lavish out its “Ah’s.” And mine.”
“Smart and witty, tantalizingly interesting characters: the boy with one wing, the inventor of invented things, the brief sparkling cameo of the cyclops...something of a little tour de force.”
“These kaleidoscopic fictions have an astonishing delicacy. They spark and cascade and then burst again, changing shape and settling into surprising, entrancing pattern.”
Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her poetry has been called "extraordinary" by both Paris Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books, while The Literary Review commented on the "immersive magic and unforgettable imagery" of Farris's writing. Farris's work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeneys, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Poetry and 2022 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023.) It has been called "luminous" by Carolyn Forche and "real genius" by Kaveh Akbar. Farris is also the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and was called "gorgeous" by Victoria Chang, "enchanting" by Jericho Brown, and "extraordinary" by The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book, which was lauded as "truly innovative" by Prague Post, "a tour de force" by Robert Coover; and as "a book with gigantic scope" by Louisville Courier-Journal. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Her awards include The Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review.
In an interview with The Kenyon Review, Farris was asked about her interest in writing in hybrid forms: "I have always loved the words “liminal” and “limn” and “lintel” and “threshold”; they are magical words. Hybrid-form works stand on thresholds, refusing definition and creating themselves out of necessity. When I say that they are created from necessity, I mean that I think these works are best suited to communicate ideas that have never been communicated before: a new form must be created to contain them. The impossible becomes possible with hybrid forms. They give us new ways to think and engage; they are specialty tools like the aye-aye’s crazy-long finger, formed to pull insect larva out of tree bark. They are investigative forms, revolutionary forms. They nourish what is strange in us."
In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris also writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily.
She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.
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