Bøger af Katie Farris

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Edited by Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky, and Valzhyna Mort. There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology's structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling--creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity--to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.

Farris warns us, "These are not stories one can hand to another and afterward ask: did your soul move like the peristalsis inside your gut?" Instead of capitalizing on the satisfying and familiar conventions of narrative, she uses the unclassifiable text, the monstrous text, and unruly prose to explore the ways language, as we know it, limits what is possible in our thinking about sexuality. For Farris, genre - with its established conventions, its repertoire of restrictions - and gender are inexorably linked. Indeed, she shows us that our most familiar categories of identity are embedded within the very texture of language itself. She reveals form, genre, and even grammar as the foundation of the social order, that alterity which speaks through us, and at the same time, defines us.

Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question 'What isn't hell?' and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a red violet cerulean handkerchief.

"Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is 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. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life-even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question 'What isn't hell?' and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a 'redvioletcerulean handkerchief'"--