Wildness Before Something Sublime

by Leila Chatti

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.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2025

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chatti is one of the most exciting poets writing contemporarily. This book felt so different from previous work, in that the polyvocality and intertextuality allowed Chatti to explore shadow spaces and pull from those spaces immense humanity and honesty. It's as if the shadows were allowed to become both a swallowing and a mirror in reach the reader is reflected back upon themselves and consumed as well.

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leila Chatti I love you forever! what a beautiful, strange book. once Leila said to me (probably offhandedly for her but it was significant to me!) that she worked best when pursuing a book as a Project. what I like so much about this collection is that it is a collection where the Project is the construction itself. as I was reading I told a friend a lot of the poems feel quite normative on first look, but in the repetition of brevity their strangeness starts to become more evident - there's a craft note in the beginning, and sort of prose-poemy-craft poems? at the end that expound on the Making involved in each section - some of the new forms she devised (ANTIPODE, in which you take an existing poem and rewrite it using each words opposite) or the method/condition in which a section was written (a series of poems written in the notes app on the brink of sleep!). I love how seriously she takes the book as an object, and the clear distress that is at times present when it is evident this book does not resemble Deluge, or even the experiment of figment, or the thematic collaboration of the mothers, and on. I love EXCESS and I love how tiny so many of these poems are while still communicating excess. last section that names suicidality more clearly had me in tears. Leila writes about struggling to get out of bed as I am reading after a week of struggling to get out of bed & I remember all of the poets I turn to when I kinda wanna die, Leila being one. what a special book. I want to spend time with it forever

[katy · Rating 4 out of 5]

kinda torn on what to rate this, but i’m going with 4 stars even tho it’s maybe 3.5/3.75 for me really

but i enjoyed this a lot! really well-organized book and the project of it is very interesting (i actually enjoyed reading the introduction and notes at the end which i rarely do)

and here are my annoying pretentious poet thoughts:

i couldn’t always wrap my head around the line break logic here… which i hate to be picky about, but it tripped me up reading so much. there were also SO MANY poems where i thought the ending happened halfway through. and unfortunately, there were a few times i literally rolled my eyes at how cheesy/cliche something was (which i did hate myself for doing right after dw)

still, most of these poems were pretty fantastic

my favs:
- equinox
- postcard (a blur of blossoms)
- postcard (the mountains hazy behind everything)
- my sentimental afternoon
- goatsong
- at this point in time
- tea

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leila is one of those poets whose work is always a treasure. I loved the explorations of night and dreams in this book, as well as her confrontation of sorrow and doubt. As always, she is honest, and her words are nothing short of captivating and beautiful.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This unshakable quiet I am told is peace. For you, I count the blessings which stitch me to this earth. Lacework of rime. Pines feathered and faithful as swans. This morning, I woke and pain, a while, stayed dreaming. Children unknowable to me left before my seeing angels in the yard.

Written over a time of grief after losing a pregnancy, these poems are gorgeous and powerful, interweaving sorrow and nature and healing. The poet is Tunisian-American, straddling the intersection in a way that makes these poems read like something from a holy book. Some amazing imagery: branches ready to sprout songs, language blooming to reveal serenity, tattered pieces of us stitched to wholeness, like the cosmos, snow illuminating us and revealing eternity.

REMEMBER GREEN’S YOUR COLOR
after Gwendolyn Brooks

Hours long and hushed as graves
in the barren season. Only night can grow.
A season I listened to no sound,
willing the nothing to speak. Shielded
my green, unyielding hurt. I believed that,
if I relinquished the pain of losing you,
I would truly lose you. But pain is fruitless
and suffering can never be your name.
You were spring. These bare boughs
bloom with song, still of use.

I am wild. I am wild. It is the wildness before something sublime: The violet hour after the earth stills, when the roots Bury their tails, their suffusion. It is so raucous, elsewhere. The shades, the bodies, are black and moving, like infinity. Silence approaches and swells. Its invisible clarity Swells, ink opening to let stillness in. It erases knowledge, languageless.

A weakness is withering within me, a new fragility. I am sutured together like the universe. There is this whiteness, This ewe of whiteness. I unfurl my soles on a sea. The water is thin. It is thin with this idleness. I am untouched. I am stilled out of touch. My ears are relieved by this whiteness. I hear everything.

IF IT MUST BE WINTER, LET IT BE ABSOLUTELY WINTER

Let it be witness. Wolf. Rime bite, brutal tenuity.
Let it be awe. Briefly. Brume—let it twist into sun.
Let it be infinite. Ultimate. Worry, wet, but bless it.
Let snow illume. Renew. Beatify. Trust it. Be bit by.
Beast of it. Bruin. Wren. Ewe. Let it mute. It still.
Nimbus. Let winter obliterate, but sweetly. If it wails,
let it be. Tristful. Numb. Woe-bitten ire. Yet useful.
Interiorly. Sweetbite want. Melt. Bit, bit. Belief.
Wan sun. Let it out. It be wrest. Brittle my I.
Let it blunt me. Wait. (Write it.) Be fruitless.
Ebony tree lit by snow. Mist. Winter. Let it be
beautiful. Wistful. Between its turmoil. (Baby.)
Enter. I let it in, in. To try. Let it be awful,
bittersweet, sublime.

I thought, I thought, and wrote it down. I thought the writing would change something; it changed myself. Which, again, I write. At the edge of sleep, I knock on the night to let me in. To reach into, under, my self. To write the true, forbidden thing I do not know I know. I see only black; I watch it spark. I write what the dark makes audible. A dream speaking what’s inner. Dark as ink in which it is written. Sky of new snow open like eternity.

THE VISIBLE WORLD

Lilac willing to be beautiful.
Wild blackberries, wild lack—
now my tenderness is full of briars.
The light like velvet. It was a time
in the world. The bluey lake dimming,
the rhubarb. You know—that simple.
Despite everything, there is still a
self in me who worships the visible
world and doesn’t take it back.
Egrets. Milkweed. Milk.
I am being here, right now.

[Jill Salahub · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Chatti's work by way of this article on Literary Hub: https://lithub.com/on-not-writing-and... The writing was so gorgeous and raw and heartbreaking, I had to get the book. The book was all of that and more. And it feels like the first book of poetry that is "mine," that I found myself -- every other poet or poetry collection came to me because I knew the author, someone gave it to me, or someone else liked the poet first and shared and that's how I found them. With this collection and this poet, I will be the one sharing, urging people to read it, and giving away copies.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about dreams and memories, poems inspired by other women poets, and the body, family, and emotional turmoil.

from Persephone: "There was, in you, this coldness. / It turned me cold. My heart, / those days, / like a window left open."

from I Dreamed I Forgot: "I dreamed I forgot / who I was—the last woman / to love you. You knew me / as a girl, when joy was / edgeless, and required / no work."

from I Can't Help Myself: "My body concerns / itself with melodrama and ache, vulgar / wakefulness. Little has changed since / I was first the target of a wrenching / affection."

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book!! And another one to add to her wonderful collections. Wildness Before Something Sublime is multi-voiced in the sense that it honors other poets' work by letting it speak through her poems, which are invariably and characteristically sound-rich and musical and playful. With the sparest of language in places and a veritable firework of sounds and words in others, Chatti unfailingly creates incredible immediacies that strike to the heart each time. She has made of language a wondrous instrument on which to sing herself back to life and us with it.

[Dylan Harbison · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say I'm a s*** for intertextuality.

Jokes aside this is one of my favorite books of poetry I've read in a long time and I'm putting it up there with Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry. Inspirational.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely gorgeous--a deeply felt and feeling collection.

[Adison · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I speak of form, of lineage, how together these led me back to language, which led me back to living… Pain made me turn to poetry, and poetry—the art of new seeing, of infinite possibility—returned me to world.”

Leila Chatti does it again. Her 2020 collection, DELUGE, knocked me flat. I loved it so much that I posted about it to my personal Instagram account (clearly my Bookstagram was four years in the making 😂). It remains one of the best poetry collections I’ve ever read and cemented Chatti as a “must-read” poet for me.

You can imagine, then, how much I anticipated her next collection, WILDNESS BEFORE SOMETHING SUBLIME. It’s equally as impressive, especially since it’s a collection of poems she wrote at a time when she “wasn’t writing.” But I think the essay at the end is the stunner. Chatti is open about her process: writing poems at night in her Notes app, quickly flipping through other works until her attention snagged on something she could write into, taking an existing poem and replacing each word with its opposite (I love this as an exercise and want to try it with my Creative Writing students someday).

This is a longer collection that I’m glad I took my time with. My favorite poems are the ones that appear in the final section—“Tea,” “Someday I’ll Love Leila Chatti,” “I Went Out to Hear”—poems that she says “arrived once [she] learned again, at last, how to move out of [her] mind’s way.” Still, I love the poems she wrote in the process of this relearning for what they represent. In a way, this collection allows the reader to follow Chatti on her journey through writer’s block, through grief. And as a new mom, the image she ends her essay with—the quiet perfection of it—stilled me.

I will echo what I wrote in my post about DELUGE four years ago: Buy this book, and everything that Chatti writes (or doesn’t write, as the case may be).