Writing of womanhood - Deluge, a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Kashiana Singh

In her debut collection of poems - Deluge, released April 2020 by Copper Canyon Press, Leila Chatti explores what the body can do and how the female experience with the body

is often canonized. She writes with inner most persuasion and focus towards the woman. Her style is gentle, her words trip over each other into the pathways of menstruation, aches and arrivals and stirred stories of possibilities.

Reading Leila Chatti is like being on a pilgrimage to an ancient monument or temple, a hush settles as one reads out loud poems like Conversationwhispered between lovers – lovers as in the body and it’s being, the mind and it’s awakening to womanhood, the soul in an embrace of itself. Deluge stems from a deep personal space, the lived experience. The truth of her writing is palpable and actually is elevated through the poem.

Like a goddess song, she sings through her words in language that singes into our spaces. Burning not in a destructive way but in a healing way. Like an untethered placenta she often talks about, this fire is the fire of the woman’s blood, her willingness to be “give up the inconceivable heaven for a warmth, I can sense”. In her poem Nulligravida Nocturne Leila Chatti talks about the endless well – of darkness, of blood, of doubt, of shadows.

I like Mary a little better when I imagine her like this, crouched and cursing

a boy-God pushing on

her cervix (I like remembering

she had a cervix, her body ordinary

and so, like mine)

I am both awestruck and awakened by her approach to Mary in the book and specifically in her poem, Confession. She demystifies Mary by bringing her to life in the moment that should matter the most – birth of Jesus. Yet is not a moment described in any text. Instead of shying away from it, Leila addresses the moment of delivering a child “like a secret she never wanted to hear”

Confession is reticent in such a powerful, controlled way that one can feel one’s physical self-pulled into each poem. In reading these poems, one is moved as one is moved when a deep spiritual experience takes you into the core of a hymn or a chant.

She brings an invocation to Mary in her poem, “Questions directed toward the idea of Mary” in which she asks in a subtle whisper – “Do you wish for me the freedom of a vast barren plain?”

Her poetry is full of empathy – in the choice of words she is empathizing with every woman who has faced a deluge in life – of emotions, of physical responses, of others wanting to judge, of contradictions. . . 

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