The Sky's Hand In You: A Review of Katie Farris's A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving

How to summarize the end of life that has become such a concrete possibility that every moment is infused with the question: will one survive or not? How to diffuse this in poetry? In A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, Katie Farris graciously and bravely erases the boundary between the artist and the theme, offering her body as the site for meaning-making.

I go to the world with my tongue out
and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys

in the lock,
a six-inch scar instead of a nipple.

“This scene has a door / I cannot close,” Farris shares concerning a cancer patient’s condition. The personal stakes couldn't be higher. Yet, the poet’s body is entrusted with an additional responsibility: to carry the poetry for as long as it can. The poet wishes “to train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn't hell.”

The motif of training recurs here, as if, instead of merely focusing on the cure, one is called upon to take advantage of one’s vulnerability to further one’s capacity to generate warmth for others. On the sharp edge of mortality, one creates beauty out of one’s very impermanence. “I was no longer hungry: everything was everything; the roots in my skull shifted and I/ lay down beneath my own branches.”

And the other side of the mirror: the love, grief and hope that accompany illness. In the opening poem, Farris explains,

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.

With tenderness and compassion, the poet observes the loved ones’ tension and despair:

how pain enters
their face
like a hand hunting
inside a
puppet

In the end, the poems become the interface between the suffering of the author and her partner and the world’s suffering on their behalf, an exchange rendered resonant through the reader’s recognition of our shared mortality. “And whom / can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.” Miraculously, it is the reader to whom the poet addresses her plea.

Does suffering enlighten, and would one chose to be enlightened in this way? So often in our living and dying, the choice is not offered.

The sky always
has its hand in you,
as if you were a puppet,

through your ears down
your throat in to your
lungs…

The inspiring, inventive title itself offers a polyphony of meanings. The work is the net whose weaving will catch the body, so that the body may continue to weave this beautiful work. But also:

I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe,
a net to catch
my body in its weaving.

Step by step, the poet takes us through diagnosis, chemo, surgery, and the beginnings of recovery. “Three drains, five scans, twenty thousand dollars!” This account buzzes with immense humanity, and the urgent intensity of Kafka’s Hunger Artist whose proofs the writer was still correcting on his deathbed.

I’m delighted that Katie Farris’ full-length collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, titled after one of the poems here, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2023. May the poet continue to stand in that forest for many years, bringing us her most illuminating work.