I wrote some of my notes on Tana Jean Welch’s In Parachutes Descending while sitting in a cafe in the Castro, sipping iced tea and delighting at the parallels between the speaker’s life and mine. Like the speaker, I had come to San Francisco from Boston, and like the speaker, after years of marriage to a man, I was in a new relationship with a woman. However, unlike the speaker, I had come to the West Coast to visit friends and family, leaving both girlfriend and husband more or less content (and fully consenting) back in Somerville. And so, my journey was less extraordinary than that of Welch’s speaker. And truthfully, I doubt the events of my life could ever match the epic qualities of this collection.
Parachutes is preoccupied with epics and also narrates one. We learn that the speaker has left her marriage, crossing the country to be with Jane. The speaker’s journey is more lyrical than linear, but like any hero, she is changed by her quest. Across the collection, we experience a multitude of other metamorphoses and disguises, some superficial, others elemental and even existential. In “The Immortal Jellyfish,” a scientist kills a jellyfish so that it can reproduce—“the trauma needed to become something new.” In the next poem, “The Immortal Jellyfish II,” the speaker says, “The day I smoothed my hand over the slope / of Jane’s nakedness I felt revived.” The speaker asks, “given a new body, would we do this world any differently?” Things would necessarily be different, but the book ultimately questions the allure of rebirth—it is a deception, another myth that humans use to comfort themselves in the face of inevitable death.
Jane herself may be a myth made for this epic of survival. Her existence is destabilized in the poems, and her name calls to mind that grandmommy of pseudonyms: Jane Doe. The line between real and imagined is blurred, and how could it not be? Show me a relationship that doesn’t include some element of fantasy, projection, or character creation. In “Why Jane Was but Wasn’t Real,” the speaker addresses her husband. At first, the poem seems to speak to the reasons that their relationship ended, but it concludes more generally: “because the struggle to know a body / is futile // hollow as a mass shooting, paltry / as a paper lantern lighting a windowless room.” For the speaker, as for all of us, other people’s true selves are hidden, occluded by our perceptions of their external selves. No one is who we think they are. No matter how in-the-flesh Jane may be, for the reader, she exists primarily in the speaker’s imagination; we understand their relationship to be real, and we see the speaker choose this imagined person in an attempt to remake herself.
In Parachutes, Welch muses on human illusions of control. This theme appears in the long poem, “Every Brittle Star,” which flows across eight pages in the middle of the book: white space abounds, and the stanzas shift from long to short, lines dribbling down one page to pool in a long stanza on the next. This relative chaos mirrors the poem’s subject—the plastics and other detritus that we humans dump into the ocean, only to have them haunt us with the knowledge that we too are at the mercy of cosmic forces. But after much swirling, the final stanzas settle into tercets that shift placidly across the page. And so, like a sneaker washed ashore, the reader lands.
Welch’s forms are generally stable and regular—couplets, tercets, quatrains, sometimes alternating or in longer blocks that step down the page. The presence of punctuation varies but is consistent across a poem. Welch’s diction is elevated but not convoluted; it is plainspoken with flashes of strangeness. As such, Parachutes is easy to engage, making it conducive to the discussion of existential topics. Welch holds subjects as challenging as suicide, abortion, and climate collapse with the care needed for their complexity to unfold. The discomfort could be more visceral, but Welch seems to know that the line is fine between activation and punishment. She avoids punishment in favor of nuance. Though I could have handled an additional gut punch or two, I appreciate that instinct.
And gut punches are not absent. In “No One Should Feel That Alone,” a poem about the speaker’s abortion, the stanzas alternate between three and two lines. The poem engages popular and fantastical stories about abortions: “The closest clinic wasn’t 300 miles away. / I took the subway. I didn’t tell my husband.... // When it was over the nurse didn’t say, / ‘it was a shad a snake a sparrow and a boy’s closed eye.’” The speaker digs herself out from our expectations to deliver two end-stopped couplets: “More monster than murdered, safe in all silences. / Oh dear Jane do you want to know I was covered in blood? // Do you want to know about the tiny bright room? / The women who were afraid? The girls who smiled?” Startlingly clear, these lines have an aggressive pathos. Through the speaker’s desperation to be understood, the myth is shattered, and in its place blooms a hope for survival through relating.
In Parachutes, we experience many sudden deaths that remind us of the fragility of life. Not least of these is that of Frank O’Hara, whose myth Welch invokes (the speaker’s only celebrity crush!) and whose accidental death haunts the collection. As we see, posthumous myths are often the most potent. By engaging the death inherent to these stories, the speaker makes space for a different future. As the title suggests, the speaker and her society appear to be on track to outlive their calamities. But what will happen when the parachutes touch ground, or water? And what of the plane from which the skydivers jumped?
In considering what the future may hold, Welch zeroes in on a peculiar venture of the moment, Seasteading—a scheme to settle the sea, which mystifies with its glib replication of past (and present) settler colonial projects. The dystopian future offered by Seasteading serves to underscore our dystopian present. We hear that a spokeswoman for the project “...fears both her own exclusion / and the inclusion of all / others / in parachutes descending / upon the high seas.” The speaker’s desire to escape herself is mirrored in a societal desire to keep remaking the myth of exceptionalism, and the delusion that it can save us.
Back in Boston, my personal epic came to an abrupt end with a breakup that I didn’t see coming. I was left to confront the myths surrounding my romantic relationships and a future that felt decidedly less certain. Parachutes might have predicted this turn. Welch brilliantly captures the human longing for an end to uncertainty, and then she offers this truth: we only survive by embracing the unknown. To know certainty is to know death. If self-deception is a parachute we carry with us, then we avoid deploying it by staying grounded in the moment, in our own bodies, however they relate to others and even if it means the epic hero never returns home.
Krysia Wazny McClain is a poet, writer, and editor. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, and her poetry and criticism have appeared in the Colorado Review, Rust & Moth, Milk Press, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and Bicoastal Review. She is also a community organizer working for prison abolition in Massachusetts and beyond.