Wildness Before Something Sublime - by Leila Chatti (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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."

Review Quotes

Praise for Wildness Before Something Sublime

Praise for Leila Chatti

"Sometimes poems give us more than we can handle. There is no real way to admit to not knowing what Chatti reveals, beyond revealing it to others: Sometimes it's brutally hard to be a woman in this world."--Reginald Dwayne Betts, New York Times

"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. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the 'flooding' it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience."--Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times

"Chatti turns fear and shame into empowerment in her unflinching debut. . . [She] translates a gritty, traumatizing experience into a hypnotic, transcendental topography of the human spirit."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"I marvel at Leila Chatti's poems, their deceptive ease, their 'calligraphy of smoke, ' their aesthetic command. 'I orbited the town of my origin.' She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. 'What kind of world will we leave/for our mothers.' In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: 'a Muslim girl who loved her father'; 'ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.' Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice."--Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic

"Leila Chatti's Figment reminded me of Inger Christensen's Alphabet but a much sparser version. The sparseness in these poems mirror the fleeting spareness of a small body which once existed but no longer exists in physical form, but just memory and imagination. The main gesture, then, in Chatti's apparitions is absence and thus what's not on the page is equally as important as what's on the page. In this way, this beautiful sequence is really exploring existentialism as a whole, mortality, and our limited time on this planet, as the poet writes: 'faint yes brief / yes but here' with no punctuation and floating on the page."--Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything

"What comes after the desperate vulnerability of hope? The radiant candor of loss--'one good thing / undone.' Leila Chatti's language is a fruit unpeeling--'yesterwas / yondermost'--inviting us to taste it, draw it into our own mouths. Figment is one of our best young poets at the height of her powers."--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

About the Author

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University's M.F.A. program.