Leila Chatti, Wildness Before Something Sublime

POSTCARD

Sky of new snow open
like eternity. Numinous, benign. All
day wind moves the day
along. January still
blank as if unbegun. I’ve come to face it—
I have to live and go on
living. With the knowledge
oblivion excludes me, apart from
brief, fathomless sleep. This unshakable quiet
I am told is peace. For you,
I count the blessings
which stitch me to this earth. Lacework
of time. 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.

I’ve been aware of Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti for a while, but hadn’t seen a collection until this latest, Wildness Before Something Sublime (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2026), a follow-up to her Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). “This book was written when I wasn’t writing. This is what I said, anyway—I’m not writing. Yet, of course,” her “AUTHOR’S NOTE” at the offset begins, “these poems exist.” Her note suggests the work in this collection a kind of pivot, shifting her work’s trajectory in a way that makes me curious to see an eventual comparison between this and her prior collection, and the collection or collections still to come. She compares the process to one of dowsing—which by itself only occurs through one being open to receiving such broadcasts—a process not far from the late San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s suggestion that he was but a transistor radio for broadcasts from the “Martians.” As Chatti’s note continues:

I think of myself as having discovered these poems rather than having wrought them—I am the one who held the rod, entered the field, but I did not conjure the water already there. I feel they are cowritten: some in conversation with another (unaware) writer, others a dictation of a voice beyond my understanding—my unconscious or an external force—call it God, the Muse, I can’t say, but I know better than to claim it as mine alone. Call it divine.

The poems in “Oracle” are written as echoes or shadow sides—responses, negative images—to poems by women whose voices first led me to discover my own. Each poem in “Divine” was written while flipping very quickly, at random, through beloved books and recording words and fragments that evoked a bodily response or otherwise snared my attention, as well as my misreadings, reactions, and associative leaps. The “Night Poems” were written on the brink of sleep, on my cell phone. Often, I would doze off midway through. The final sections, “After Thought” and “Shadow/Self,” are the poems that arrived once I learned again, at last, how to move out of my mind’s way.

Might someone else be able or willing to track the distances and differences between this collection and her prior? I would hope so, given how deliberate such an opening declaration. Chatti writes of being open to receiving the words, as well as returning to the foundations of what prompted her to write in the first place; finding her ground, again. And Chatti offers an array of responses, after works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Jean Valentine, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Alejandra Pizarnik, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich and C.D. Wright, citing a few of these poets more than once. Through returning to this array of poets, as she says, “women whose voices first led me to discover my own,” it seems to reinforce this consideration of the author attempting to find ground after feeling untethered. Go back to the basics, as it were, returning to those poems and those writers that provided those original reasons to begin. In the first poem “after Sylvia Plath,” the four-poem sequence “ONE WOMAN: A Poem Unvoiced,” Chatti writes:

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.

Across five sections—“ORACLE,” “DIVINE,” “NIGHT POEMS,” “AFTER THOUGHT” and “SHADOW/SELF”—these poems do seek a return to balance through and after loss and grief, the sensation of such spelled out through poems such as “GRIEF,” that opens: “Like a hawk, gyring / out of reach. / In sweet of shadow / larger than its origin.” Across deeply intimate heartbreak, Chatti writes around infertility and dreams, desire and the impossibility of hope. “Will you ever / speak to me again, beyond / my nightly resurrections? My desire / displaces, is displaced.” she writes, as part of the poem “MY SENTIMENTAL AFTERNOON,” a poem that offers this devastating closure: “It’s true: I am learning to believe / there are beautiful things / never meant for me.” Still, there are ways through which one can see this a book of optimism, working through as Chatti composes poems clawing through the dark and attempting what might lay beyond, although the collection as a whole is far more detailed, more complex, than simply that. Through connecting her grief and hope through the language of other women, other poets, Chatti works to reconnect to her very roots, reminding her of that sense of community especially required through such feelings of untethered loss. “I run under water / a fistful of blueberries,” she writes, in the poem “FOR THE BABY THAT IS NOT, IS NO LONGER, COULD ONE DAY BE,” “a kettle / I watch until it shrieks. My face, / so I can face it.” And here, the crux of the collection, perhaps: however dark this moment of grief, to be able to face it, however screaming and wild and silent; for grief to land, to process, it has to fully be, and it is, here. Or, as the poem “A WOMAN HAS TO LIVE HER LIFE” ends:

You took you from us
and two decades later I’m on a mountain
startling at butterflies, shivery
phantoms in the yellow clover.
And the clouds quietly knit over.
And I take a different path back down.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeannette L. Clariond

Jeannette L. Clariond [photo credit: Daniel Tamez] is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It confirmed writing as a long-term vocation rather than a passing impulse. Though one knows since birth that the vocation lies within. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I only read and write poetry and essays. It is hard to read fiction. And harder to distinguish it from reality.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing come quickly at first, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
For me, writing always begins with reading. I read slowly and deeply, feeling the author's voice and allowing it to find its way into my life. No notes, just memory and previous experiences. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem usually begins with a line, an image, or a rhythm. I like listening to Gregorian Chants. Dreams also start a project. This happened with Leve sangre (Unburdened Blood), translated by Curtis Bauer a few years ago as Image of Absence. That collection is sustained by music. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m afraid I’ve read too much of Job: If I speak, the wound bleeds. If I remain silent, it bleeds too. 
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
No theoretical concerns. I write questions for which I find no answers. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of a writer is to create consciousness of our world, as scary as it may be. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor can be disturbing, as it requires letting go of certain attachments. In this book, we (Forest and I) discussed many lines. I am happy because he was much of an editor at his best, not only a translator. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
What I am doing new is writing by hand, eyes closed, allowing myself to see images inside the words I write, no matter how strange or extravagant they might seem. My fears, old and new, my desires, ancient and actual, flow along the ink in an endless drift. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Translation is (to me) the best way to learn how to deep read. I do not feel I am taking time out from my work; on the contrary, it is a way to nourish my own process. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Not too much of a routine. Your eyes stare at poetic figures, and you learn to decipher the ones that will start-jump you into a poem. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Good cinema. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Face cream.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Theatre, opera, woods, dawns. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Hölderlin, Trakl, Benn, the poetry of Kabbalah. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Drama. One actress. A soliloquy. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Poets are born poets. No options here. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My mother’s eyes and her way of reciting Hamlet or Kipling. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Francesco Petrarca & Giovanni Boccaccio. 

Film: Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on two prose books that I started during COVID. Both are the continuation of Cuaderno de Chihuahua. They both relate to my ancestors, exile, and madness.  And in a poetry collection, Abandonments. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late February, 2026: Roberto Harrison, Abigail Garrison + Hugh Thomas,

By now you’ve heard that VERSeFest is coming up in a few weeks, yes? And hosting poetry workshops with Calgary poet Sheri-D Wilson and Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch! Spaces are still available! You should sign up to those. And did you hear I’ve a new poetry collection out later this spring?

MI/Kingston NY: From Milwaukee poet and editor Roberto Harrison (and the first publication of his I’ve seen) comes Posthuman Native: The Orchid (Kingston NY: Spiral Editions, 2025), an assemblage of poems each composed with lines that accumulate, stacked like cord wood. “a stretch of the body / ghosts matter in the light / of the shadows,” begins the poem “end mark for recursion,” “we / signal the afternoon / without a place to be outright / we make noise in the river / wood is out everywhere / in stacks of keys.” Through a heft of lyric, Harrison ebbs and flows through the query: what does it mean to be post-human? There’s a pacing, rhythm to these pieces that reads pulsed, almost unrelenting; a collage of layered lines that really shine across the lyric. And in the centre of the collection, eight full-colour collages that burst through. Each poem is thick, both in density and size, each of the eighteen poems assembled here far too large to large to include here (although there is a shorter one in Spanish, which does intrigue). There’s an urgency to Harrison’s poems, one fueled by a fierce intelligence and ongoing meditation on who we are and have become, and where, instead, we should be. We should, we could, be so much better. As the first half of the poem “patterns speaking,” reads:

what has made me move
to allow the streams to feel like blood
flown for the birds, for the hummingbird
night? my bodies stand to allow
discussion of the number, my bodies
remain outside in the afterimage
of darkness, when I speak, there is
another to stand within, there is another
to remain outside in the water. of all
the above ground monuments, I do not
have a single white flag for surrender, I
do not know what the symbol is to return
again, to the faltering display of human
arrogance, my revolver does not turn
and I do not become like the river
that we know. I do not become
like the fine gold that another planet
makes us move around in, in the exception
to winter I become again what I am not.

America, somewhere: A further title produced by b l u s h produced “in an undisclosed number of copies) in their “illicit zines” series is FUGUE (summer 2025) by Abigail Garrison, an individual described online as “a poet and artist living in Mexico City.” FUGUE is composed as a sequence of fifteen numbered short bursts of first-person molologue/meditation, slowly moving and stretching across and within a particular held moment. “the barrel forms / a perfect circle” Garrison writes, to open poem “vii,” “pacing back / the quest / crossing the / fragrant / churchyard / I go / uphill / uphill / desert clouds / buffer in / fabulous / mirage rippling / distant / like the sea [.]” There is a distance the poem, the narrator and narration, reaches for, but one that can’t ever be reached, purposefully stretching to see what might lay behind the horizon of the next moment. The lyric holds pause, slow and deliberate, even purposeful, in its meandering. Or, as the first poem in the sequence reads:

uninspired except for
objects I keep
candlesticks
linen sheets
silver rings
in a dish
in a dish
memory cards
moonstone
a desert wind blows across
my field of vision
tousled
night after night
I come to town
in red silk shorts

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: From perennial favourite Hugh Thomas comes the new translation They Want to Steal My Name by Henri Michaux (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2025). For some years now, Montreal-based Thomas has been working translations of poems from languages he doesn’t read or understand, utilizing the source material as a kind of jumping-off point into something entirely new and original, playing a surrealism of mistranslated poems across a small array of chapbooks (including some through above/ground). Although, given how long Thomas has lived in Montreal, this does read a straighter (relatively) series of translations, offering a new line of thinking across work already working a surrealism by the late Henri Michaux (1899-1984), a writer, poet, and visual artist of Belgian origin who lived much of his adult life in Paris. The poems here have the flavour of certain titles produced over the years by La Presse (a press I haven’t heard of in some time, are they even still around?). The poems are built with a prose structure but lyric line, one infused with a curious blend of elements, both straight and surreal simultaneously (with shades of Stuart Ross, also). I would hope that Thomas continues on this particular trajectory, I would love to see these pieces find a home in a full collection.

They want to steal my name

As I was shaving this morning, stretching out and lifting my lips a little to get a tauter surface, affording a good resistance to the razor, what do I see? Three gold teeth! I, who have never been to the dentist!

Ha! Ha!

And why?

Why? To make me doubt myself, and then to take my name of Barnabas from me. Oh, they’re pulling hard on the other side, they’re pulling and pulling.

But I am also ready, and I hang on to it. “Barnabas,” “Barnabas,” I say, softly but firmly, and on their side, all their efforts are reduced to nothing.

Andrea Rexilius, Séance of the Bees

 

I found a flight pattern, a ritual, a trace, a beehive, an infinite knot, a way to write and revise, and revise again. A way to resentence the sentence my sister and I had been handed. To change the story by telling our story. To enter a wound. To face it again and again until we are transformed by it. Until we see it clearly and move it through our body.

My sister and I are not related. Not by blood. But we are the same age, and we are both named Andrea. Her mother and my father married when we were 10. I always thought of her as part doppelganger, part mirror-image. I was jealous that her mother fled with her in the night, brought her to America. For me it was the opposite. My mother fled to California but left me behind in Chicago with my dad. My sister’s mother is dramatic, emotional, talkative, whereas my own mother is pragmatic, quiet, and emotionally reserved.

I began stitching lines instead of writing them.

 

A line is a descent, an exception into the underworld, into the root system of language. It marks an act of sensing, of perception translated by the realm of the mouth.

 

I titled the stitches, Séance of the Bees. (“As Long as the Stitch will Hold”)

The latest from Denver, Colorado poet and editor Andrea Rexilius is the poetry title Séance of the Bees (Troy NY: CLASH Books, 2026), a book that extends the title section of her prior collection, Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], writing through and around the death of her sister, and an ongoing grief. “To engage with séance as a form of research. As a way of calling forth,” she writes, near the opening of the collection, “a way of uncovering the feminine. Not to speak as, but to speak alongside. Not to decode or decipher but to create a cacophony. A woven tongue of one. // The collaged poetess as source text. The she as sorceress.” Utilizing collaged text and image, I find it intriguing the way that Rexilius extends this conversation through her own response to grief, to her late sister; furthering what doesn’t or, really, shouldn’t easily or quickly leave, but, as ever, takes the time and the process that it requires, on its own terms. “My sister has to come up again.” she writes, to open “What Asks Us to Be Formed.” “It’s the way repetition works. Something dives down. Another thing comes up for air. To create a hem. Confine. Piece of cloth edging around you. A blank page folding in on the circumference of your body. The subject is one of enclosure and one of breath. To be drowned inside a particular story. The story that is your un-telling.” There is such a physicality, such a tangible quality to Rexilius’ lines, enough that they might hold one aloft, or pull you in. Such heft and heartbreak, one might get lost in.

I’ve been an admirer of Rexilius’ work for some time now, as she is also the author of To Be Human Is To Be a Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) [see my review of such here] and New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here]. There’s such a lyric through her prose, a prose held as poetry, and an interest in constructing collage into such a layered coherence; one that thinks through from a foundation of human empathy and interconnectedness to others; one that has always held an open heart across a fine intelligence and an ear for music. “She will be carried from the flowers of one language to another.” Rexilius writes. “She will be carried downstream to a cave at the edge of the river. Feel behind her stone pathway and mossy roof, inner cathedral singing with the voice of a witch.”

The Way the Language Was

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house.
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.