Leila Chatti

In dreams and memories, night poems and a centos, Wildness Before Something Sublime emerges at the edge of language to excavate the body--its desires and griefs.Leila Chatti's Wildness Before Something Sublime confronts a world defined by dualities--love and loss, beauty and mental illness, the gift of "Sunflowers / by the roadside..." and the pain of losing a pregnancy. "Night Poems" written on the brink of sleep travel the dream-world and the subconscious seeking the unfiltered self, and to understand desire, identity, and the body. Other poems become acts of divination, calling on God and the Muse, calling on the voices of beloved women poets--Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, C. D. Wright--to comb through the dark. Just as chronological narratives struggle to hold the shifting weight of grief, so too must these poems fragment, become: ruptures of language, experimentations, refractions, a kaleidoscopic of recurring sound and image. Snow, light, milk, clouds, silence. Behind every positive image the shadow of its opposite, an echo of emotion. As Chatti bridges the threshold between dream and language, the external and interior, a new world unlocks--a world in which darkness is reclaimed. "My God. How lucky to have lived / a life I would die for."

Here, within these collected zines, you’ll find enough spotted ponies to fill at least three large stables to the brim. Although, of course, you wouldn’t have much luck coaxing them in there. No, instead, it’s likely because of the free rein they’ve been given, because they’ve been cut loose, that so many spotted ponies seem to have chosen these poems as their breeding ground. We’ve never offered them much scrutiny; never subjected them to any polishing or meticulous adjustments. Each of our spotted ponies simply exists in its natural state, as a product of our own wild abandon.

"To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. --Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur'an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection's themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti's remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti's journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.