A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving

by Katie Ferris

Her soul and body after chemotherapy and radiation

Genres: Poetry

40 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Julie]

I bought this book of poetry online back in April 2022, as it wasn't available through my library system. I can't remember how it came to my attention, and sadly, it languished on my book shelves until now. I rediscovered this slim volume while sorting through my books.

As I started reading, it quickly became clear that the author is taking us on a journey through cancer. It is at once an intimate, and compelling view of her experience and how cancer changes her body. Sometimes, I wanted to look away, however Katie Farris somehow dared me to keep on reading to the end.

My favorite poem overall is "I Wake to Find You Wandering the Museum of My Body" for its wonderful descriptive language and tenderness. Here is the last verse:

"My organs are the furniture galleries everyone skips, but for you, carpenter, standing guilt-fingered before my heart's armoire, stroking always toward the grain."

[Lyd Havens]

Absolutely stunning. This chapbook made me want to write a million love poems, hug my body, take a long walk, tell someone, anyone, "thank you."

(And as Katie Farris has said before on social media, if you have breasts, get them checked for cancer if/when you can <3)

[Anatoly Molotkov]

"The sky always/ has its hand in you,/ as if you were a puppet,// through your ears down/ your throat into your/ lungs - and with the tips// of its fingers there, it caresses/ every capillary, each blood cell,/ until they blush." A beautiful and important collection that faces the reader with mysteries of love and mortality and examines the way our bodies, so much smaller than ourselves, are ourselves after all.

[Vendela]

It’s not easy to write about cancer. But this is lovely and graceful poetry that doesn’t shy from the worst of it.

[Clifford]

The poems in this chapbook are about illness and recovery and love, and I found them to be very moving, both heartbreaking and hopeful.

[Joseph Schreiber]

This chapbook chronicles or, perhaps, responds to the cancer that is staking a claim on her body as she holds fast to the love and the poets who are with her her support. Unflinching and honest, the collection of poems speaks from inside the body with an awareness only illness can heighten.
After a long delay, a longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2021/12/09/to...

[David]

This collection is a moving account of illness and recovery and a love story with a partner and with being rooted in the world. In conversation with Emily Dickinson, we get a fearless confrontation with death, and in conversation with Whitman, we get a celebration of the body and its place in the natural world. From the ending poem “What Would Root”: “I was no longer hungry; / everything was everything; the roots in my skull shifted and I / lay down beneath my own branches.”
This Chap book contains “Why Write Poetry in a Burning World,” which made its rounds on the internet as a poem perfect for the times, and it also contains the poem that gives Farris’s new full length collection its name:” Standing in the Forest of Being Alive.”
A powerful and inspiring collection for anyone who wants to penetrate the secret of learning to stay alive.

[Timons Esaias]

Powerfully emotional subject matter, strong writing.

My favorites were “The Man You Are the Boy You Are” and “What Would Root”.

Given the subject, this doesn’t seem like the kind of book one rates or critiques.

[Alyse Knorr]

A luminous chapbook about cancer, the body, and marriage. I’m in awe of how Farris covers the full range of human emotions in just a few short pages. Her love poems are truly enviable.

[nachobunny]

Absolutely stunning. beautiful, moving, poignant. “to offer poems of love to a burning world” pretty much sums it up. one of my favorite poetry collections 🩵