When the Forest Finds You

When the Forest Finds You delights in both comforting and unnerving. Stabile lures the reader in with familiar horror movie tropes and imagery only to turn them on their head — forging consonants into blades, stanzas into spells. These poems left me with the same, barely-describable feeling I get from a good slasher: a sense of deep, knowing dread and an irresistible compulsion to keep going.

—Joe Vallese, editor It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

Lannie Stabile has written an intense, biting book of poems that depicts and alchemizes experiences and enduring psychological repercussions of sexual violence with graphic evocations, sardonic wit, and experiments with received form. Reading When the Forest Finds You, I was reminded of the 2020 revenge thriller film Promising Young Woman, among other contemporary works that play with expectations of genre to boldly confront gendered victim-abuser dynamics without offering neat arcs of redemption.

—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

Lannie Stabile delivers us the director’s cut: deleted scenes and unreleased epilogues, excavated truths about characters and cast, alternate endings that at first promise different—but bring us to the same dizzying end. With precision and sensitivity fine-tuned for the darkroom, Stabile takes control of narrative, showing us how horror stories of lost autonomy have permeated media, yet what comes after, the complexity—and often isolation—of survival remains obscure. When the Forest Finds You is what many protagonists experience off-screen, between scenes, after credits have rolled—in real life. This chapbook is both a portrait of survivors’ solitude and promise from Stabile to her speakers and readers: no matter how old the wound, we navigate the labyrinth of recovery together.

—Noreen Ocampo, author of Not Flowers