In Wildness, Chatti splits in two—the shadow and the self—to explore desire, the body, and the ordinary but devastating grief of a woman.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 to 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 can, cannot, or should biologically do. Under the shifting weight of this grief, 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 unfolds—a world in which darkness is reclaimed.
