In dreams and memories, night poems and 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.
ISBN: 9781556597169
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“Explores desire, loss, illness, the body, and divinity through dreams, centos, and fragmented forms.”—Publishers Weekly, Fall Preview 2025
“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
“These poems seek to write the self out of distraction into something freer, braver.”—Summer Farah, Adi Magazine