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.

Our Everyday Madness: A Review of Katie Farris’s boysgirls

To read Katie Farris’ boysgirls is to step into a circus, a burlesque, a theater, a brothel, yourself—step up and preform, “You’re used to sitting back and eavesdropping,” our narrator flirtatiously scolds us, “playing the voyeur on the lives of others. But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not.”

And you do. As you peel back the covers and descend deeper and deeper into this uncertain territory, new myths that read like poetry, you notice yourself both aroused and slightly ashamed, in the most enjoyable way. You meet a girl with a mirror for a face, loved by people, who yet desires nothing but a mouth so that she can eat. You realize you are both her, and the people who look into her.

You move on, and meet many other girls. The girl who grew and was feared, the girl who listens to Christian talk radio while sanding the blade that is her mother’s mother, the girl who is a cyclops and explains loss to scientists. Our narrator watches over you, gauges your needs and guides you to through the performance of these girls who are only performing you. And you move on.

Delightfully, you find the girl who Satan has enlisted to shit on his face. She reveals something more of yourself, of the anxieties sex encompasses, the absurdity of the orgasm as goal. The elusive line between performance and surrender. “She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.”

The performance continues, until you are asked again to participate, at what can serve as the intermission. If this entire collection has not been a type of riddle in itself with you as the answer, well then you, dear reader, must entertain the narrator by answering the riddle proposed between the section on girls and the section on boys.

The section on boys serves more as a parable than a series of myths. You meet the boy with one wing, a “halfway boy” who is seduced by a cheerleader, and makes love to another girl in the mud. While this is happening we meet the inventor of invented things and realize that we are nothing new, that each fear and joy we have experienced has already been created and that we have simply experienced them with our own bodies for the first time. Is there less shame in that? Less fear of our own shadow? No. That would diminish our exhilaration.

As any creator, The Inventor of invented things discovers the invention of love with the boy with one wing. “What is this?” he asks. To be a true invention does it need a name, a definite shape and rules? And what will they do with this new thing? 

Katie Farris creates a Kafkaesque reality that reveals our everyday madness. To read it is a dark and whimsical delight, a joy in the grotesque. A reminder that the grotesque is normal, and that it is the source of both shame and orgasm.