Sylvia Santiago: “A Review of Lannie Stabile’s When the Forest Finds You”

CW: Sexual Violence

Horror movies are intended to evoke intense feelings of dread and fear in an audience. In When the Forest Finds You, poet Lannie Stabile employs these movie tropes to illuminate the horrors of sexual violence against women and the trauma that haunts the survivors afterwards.

Many of the twenty-seven poems are titled after tropes such as “Cabin in the Woods”, “Obligatory Shower Scene”, and “The Killer Is Inside the House.” Though the titles may seem simplistic, the poems are anything but. The “Victim #” pieces, especially, are compelling. “Victim #2, or The Body No One Notices Right Away” reflects on how a survivor of sexual violence continues to suffer long after the assault. Written in the second-person point of view, the poem draws the reader in with a disquieting intimacy:

        If you’re lucky, time passes & you no longer carry the weight of
                 his body
                        on yours.

        You start to forget the clench of your weak thighs, the frenzied pattern of
                                           the bedspread,
                                                   the depression
        in the pillow.

In contrast, the bluntness of the opening verses of “Victim #5, or Thanks for the Sacrifice, Brad” is jarring: “The girl is only as good as the next shotgunned beer. / Something wet that fills the gut of midnight.”

Stabile experiments with different poetic forms throughout the collection. These forms include a pantoum, a found poem, a list poem, and a Golden Shovel poem titled “Lights Flicker”. In “Lights Flicker”, the last word or word fragment of each line is, in order, taken from a line of dialogue in The Shining. Stabile skillfully uses this technique to present a searing narrative of sexual predation and violence. 

The poems in When the Forest Finds You aren’t easy to read, nor are they meant to be.  

The brutal reality of sexual violence juxtaposed with fabricated horrors results in a collection that is disturbing, riveting, and ultimately, thought-provoking.

Sylvia Santiago is a writer and collage artist from western Canada. Her words have appeared in Flash Frontier, HAD, The Indianapolis Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She reads for Parentheses Journal and Uncanny Magazine.