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Our April 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Katie Farris‘s, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. Read an excerpt below and subscribe by March 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.
The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—
This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
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“Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World” (poem) from Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, Alice James Books, 2023
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