Leila Chatti

This stunning debut blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and pop culture in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Deluge

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. In TUNSIYA/AMRIKIYA, emerging Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti explores the nuances of multicultural identity, the necessity of family, and the perennial search for belonging. From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.

Tunsiya/ Amrikiya

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

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