Wildness Before Something Sublime

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.”

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.