Wildness Before Something Sublime

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. Praise for Wildness Before Something Sublime “Explores desire, loss, illness, the body, and divinity through dreams, centos, and fragmented forms.”— Publishers Weekly , Fall Preview 2025 “These poems seek to write the self out of distraction into something freer, braver.”— Summer Farah, Adi Magazine “Language is defined by inversion and duality. In Wildness Before Something Sublime , Leila Chatti juxtaposes imagery and emotion with their opposites, rendering a sensational landscape that invites reflection. Whether drawing on a long tradition of women poets or plumbing the body’s potential for loss, Chatti approaches loss with patience and an understanding that there is a vast measure of light behind the darkness. That light comes through in these poems, like pinpricks of distant stars.”— Electric Lit , Best Poetry Collections of 2025 “Chatti’s work contains absolute gut-punches: poems that invite us to look inward, wonder what it is we are afraid of saying, and ask what will happen if we just do it instead. Attempts define the formal experimentation of Wildness >, with each subsequent attempt there is a processing of avoidance, a confrontation with it, and a move toward self-actualization. At the end of the book, Chatti has a brief lyrical craft essay for each technique. The marrying of disclaimer, content, and notes all within the same sort of attempt makes Wildness especially unusual as an art object; different from her past works in that it is not dictated by a tight motif or theme, Wildness > is about the act of making itself and all of the tensions encompassed within.”— Summer Farah and Samia Saliba, SWANA , Favorite Books of 2025 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