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.

The Love of an Old Friend: Remembering Monica A. Hand

“Who are you?” Monica Hand asked me, the first time we finally got the nerve to speak to each other. Columbia, Missouri is small, and the literary community is tiny. As an undergrad, I’d go to poetry readings, open mics, and author craft talks. I was just as much of a book nerd as anyone else attending those events, but I was ignored in those places. Too young and maybe too black to be taken seriously by the older white crowds. I was shy, awkward, and sometimes too eager to run home to my fast-food leftovers to stick around and mingle with crowds that would rather look me up and down with their noses upturned than chat with me.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re everywhere.”

“Yeah, I see you all the time too,” I said. “I’m an English major.”

“And I teach here.”

Our conversation was brief, but since then, if we saw each other at literary events, we would exchange simple head nods or smiles in acknowledgement of each other. She saw me and I saw her: black women navigating white spaces to participate in the thing we loved—literature.

To be a black woman in America is to be the owner of many masks. I wear a diluted mask when I’m in places where I’m the minority: at work, shopping downtown, at literary events, and the like. It’s the mask I wear when I’m hyper aware of the space I take up. The mask I wear in order to survive. A mask Hand spotted from across the room and chose to approach with warmth.

About a year or so after our official introduction, Hand passed away. Her death was abrupt, causing Columbia to, at least for a while, pause and lament our friend, our teacher, our pair of fingers snapping for us at open mics. Things eventually picked up again, as life after another’s death tends to do, and I went back to my craft talks and author readings. Only then, without her familiar face smiling, or nodding, or simply affirming my presence there.

Hand gave us a final gift: just one week before she passed, she signed the contract for her second poetry collection DiVida to be published by Alice James Books. In DiVida, Hand addresses the idea of navigating white society. An idea we both knew all too well in Columbia and an idea every Person of Color must come to terms with in America. Hand explores this navigation as it relates specifically to black women with the help of two characters: DiVida, who wants to assimilate into white society; and her subconscious Sapphire, who doesn’t want to sacrifice her true self to appease others. Hand states that housing these multiple personas, these multiple masks, “masks the madhouse.” To be able to break oneself apart, to bend, mold, flex, and sometimes even break oneself into different masks to simply survive in a world that has only one view of you can cause craziness.

Sapphire attempts to save DiVida from this madness. Early in the collection, in “DiVida becomes Captain of the Lacrosse Team,” DiVida refuses to deny herself the love of Lacrosse, even if she may be the only black person on the team. Sapphire asks “Why you wanna play with people who want to slave you?” Throughout the book, Sapphire continues to argue that black women shouldn’t bounce between masks and be their full, unapologetic selves at all times, regardless of how uncomfortable it will make white society. In DiVida, we explore DiVida and Sapphire’s opposing positions and Hand forces us to grapple with the space that exists between the two.

With every move DiVida makes, Sapphire is in her ear, criticizing DiVida when she censors herself to tackle everything from getting pulled over by a police officer to chatting at a work event. Hand creates Sapphire’s warnings with a cadence that feels like they’re coming from the love of an old friend. These warnings serve as reprimands to DiVida for even wanting to survive a life amongst those who, she feels, want nothing to do with her. Sapphire speaks like an elder who has seen this play out in the lives of other black women before and she attempts to end the cycle here, with DiVida, on the page.

At times, DiVida’s voice wavers and cracks under both society’s and Sapphire’s pressure: in “DiVida submits to her Duende” we see DiVida reach a breaking point. Tired of succumbing to society, she allows herself to escape:

“she let loose the boogeyman / unchained the monkey on her back / Sapphire sucker-punches her in the gut / just to be sure / there is blood / there are tears…”

Hand captures the internal struggle of black womanhood in America through DiVida and Sapphire’s ongoing conflict. She leaves her readers to ask how much of DiVida’s actions are performative and just her being her true self. She then forcers us as readers to question our performative and actual selves—our unique masks—as we navigate our own spaces in society.