I Went Out to Hear

Leila Chatti

The sound of quiet. The skyindigo, steepingdeeper from the top, like tea.In the absenceof anything else, my ownbreathing became obscene.I heard the beatingof bats’ wings beforethe air troubled abovemy head, turned to lookand saw them gone.On the surface of the blacklake, a swan and the moonstayed perfectlystill. I knew this wasa perfect moment.Which would only hurt meto remember and neverlive again. My God. How lucky to have liveda life I would die for.

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  • What Sparks Poetry

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Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati.

Color cover image to Leila Chatti's collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime

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Wildness Before Something Sublime
Copper Canyon Press

Port Townsend, Washington

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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.

“Explores desire, loss, illness, the body, and divinity through dreams, centos, and fragmented forms.”
—Publishers Weekly

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