Wildness Before Something Sublime

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, wonder and despair, 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 mind to unearth the unfiltered self, to understand identity, desire, 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. Chatti expertly grapples with the pain of what a body should but cannot do. Under the shifting weight of this grief, poems fragment, become ruptures of language, experimentations, refractions, a kaleidoscope 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 gap between dream and language, the external and internal, a new world emerges—a world in which darkness is reclaimed.

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.