The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this interview, I.S. Jones spoke with poet Aricka Foreman about leaping from her chapbook to her debut full-length collection, Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books, 2020), the uses of water and land throughout, and her decision to go with YesYes Books. 

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In Salt Body Shimmer, Foreman’s work concerns itself with multiple, inherited violences through the lens of women in a generation. Rich in its lyrical tenor, the book is intimately political for the way in which it is deeply rooted in the geography of the South as well as the geography of the body. Memory is often a slippery beast throughout Foreman’s work, as readers are pulled back and forth through time and its deeply private moments. Negotiating gender, class, race, divinity, and history, Salt Body Shimmer is a debut that never flinches from saying out loud what is often unutterable. When I think about an American experience, I look to this book for its elegant ability to blend many spiritual practices. This is a world crafted through the lens of women who have had to learn spells older than themselves, who have had to create a path for their survival.

Salt Body Shimmer by Aricka Foreman: A Sea-like Sensemaking 

I. S. Jones: Before Salt Body Shimmer, you had a limited-edition chapbook also with YesYes Books called Dream with A Glass Chamber. Your chapbook was described as “a response to grief and its complicated rituals.” With your debut collection, there is grief, but what seems more prominent is ritual. Here, in the landscape you have crafted, there is an inextricable binding thread between ritual, spirituality, and Black girlhood. How did your chapbook prepare you to craft a full-length collection and how does the lens of orishas, of Yoruba spirituality, give you language to confront some of the more fraught aspects of black girlhood?

Aricka Foreman: This is a great question, thank you. I think Dream allowed me some grace. I could embrace the process. It’s a book that deals very intentionally with grief, but I think part of what I gained from that work was honing it on paying intention/attention to the questions that rose from it. And that the point is not to answer the question(s) but live with the discomfort of wrestling with inquiry as its own creative mode. There’s an entire tradition of poets who write toward Western ideologies and their figures: Greek and Roman influences still have such a stronghold given we produce work in English. We’ve made these mythologies their own canon. Yoruba, Candomble, Lacumi: these traditions are their own canons, too. I was interested in picking up the threads I’d find in my research, imagining the possible figures who might help the speaker navigate through Black girlhood. Even in Greek mythology, the gods guide the protagonists through epic trials and journeys, attempting to save beloveds from the underworld. As we’re learning more intensely these days, we’re living in and sharing Hades. Recognizing a Black, Brown, Indigenous ecosystem often keeps me from being swallowed up by violence, I hoped to focus on how to break and paint language to live through the happening of those traumas. Girlhood is not easy. And Black girlhood has its own interwoven adoptions we often don’t fully apprehend while we’re busy trying to ride through it. There’s a resistance to that old knowing. I wanted to make room to ask and accept. To keep what informs us as a touchstone if we want it. 

IJ: You made the choice to publish both your chapbook and full-length with the same press, which is something that does happen but not often. Can you speak further about your choice to stay with YesYes Books? When deciding on a press for Salt Body Shimmer, what were things you wanted, things you expected, and how did YesYes show you they were the right press for your book and how you hoped it would be presented to the world?

AF: KMA Sullivan asked me for a book years before Dream was even a thing. And not to necessarily publish it, but she was just interested in what I was working on. And she was persistent without being pushy. Over the years, we’d stay in contact sometimes never talking about a book at all. I knew I wasn’t ready yet, but that I would be. And then I lost three people in one year to various circumstances, the hardest was a close friend Blair who the book is dedicated to. She reached out to offer her condolences and offered support in whatever I needed. Just, you know, very human. And that cemented my trust, that she’d care enough about me to care about the work. And that she’d tell me the truth.

I wanted my chapbook and my debut to be held with care— to not be just a catalog number. And I knew I had a very specific vision for how I wanted it to operate in the world as an object. YesYes makes gorgeous art objects that work hand-in-hand with the language inside its pages. And as far as small presses go, the entire staff hustles with excitement about getting your book into as many folks’ hands as possible. I think all of that was critical to these emerging projects. I knew that my work found a home.

IJ: I want to talk about how the poems are ordered in the book, which seems to be governed by a thematic structure. For example, the poem “Hydrocephalus As a Misnomer For Water God”, a poem that does an elegant job of straddling the space between the divine and sickness, ends with the lines: “What is Atlantis to a child born in The Wake /  but iridescent, sharp as shells, ready to / open the flesh” which then segues us into “Blue Magic”, a poem with a title that is double and triple jointed for how it evokes the might of the sea while also the unruly beauty of Black hair. Even if poems were written years apart, how did you decide on the ordering?

AF: I have to thank Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake for pressing that poem. I read the work of many Black women critical-creative historians while forming Salt Body Shimmer. But I also want to honor the intuitive power of allowing poems to find their roots. While the ocean was a large metaphor, it functions so specifically for those of us on this side of a diaspora. And I wanted to key into a language, rich and dexterous, that could tie all that history.  I was invited to my first hair show in Detroit very early; and the pageantry, contemporary art display, born from migration, music, and performance: I found it exquisite. That technology goes where you go. The violence of industry, commerce, imperialism, and conquest…it all marks our relationships to the sea. And we’ve managed to adopt some beauty from it. I’d be complicit in that violence if I didn’t name its origins. And: who else could name a care product Blue Magic?

The order was sea-like. Those poems, particularly, had to move as you noticed. There needed to be that thread. It was irresistible, and that is its own sense-making.

IJ: Can you speak more to the physical geography of where these poems take place? There seem to be two worlds: the South (as an epicenter of tradition, generational pain, but also lush fields and space) and the Body (as an epicenter of sexual violence and betrayal, but also memory which seems to pull the narrator back and forth through time).

AF: We’re all descendants of migration, and that’s hard to move away from. I feel lucky, having been communally raised by Mississippi grandparents who found one another at the tail-end of the Southern Migration in Chicago, before moving to Inkster, MI. I find the links in subtle ways. How I’m raised and still say lightning bugs. If Blackness is a technology, then why wouldn’t our bodies be data centers? We record the narratives, what we witness, and cross-reference. We’re informed by those reports. But I have a strong reaction to the pastoral. Even landscapes that aren’t every day accessible to me feel like home.

It’s the only way I can travel and find rooting, or encounter memories I’ve never had. In Cuba, a friend and I had a running joke, that nobody liked cainito but me. And I can’t articulate what about it feels like to know it with my two hands. There’s something about that bodily kinship that I can’t ignore.

On America’s South: it’s more global than we remember to give credit. The ports, plantations; degradation and horror; the resistance of our songs and dances, cuisines and faith…there’s no way to separate any of that. I think I’m trying to branch out of American imperialism as a centered experience while recognizing what I can salvage from its violence. America is so young. America’s got a lot to answer for how we had to make a way. So I try to make room for and tend to the somatic. My body: an archive. It must be preserved in the names of all who left something behind, and they left a ledger.

IJ: What did the process of completing a manuscript and publishing it teach you about yourself? On the professional and marketing side of the process, what did you find yourself learning along the way? For example, there is a long, exhaustive marketing questionnaire authors often must fill out, which will include questions such as, “Do you have poems translated into other languages?” “Do you have a Wikipedia page?” “What demographic is your book targeted towards?”

AF: Publishing a book is weird, and not the same as writing a book. In the writing, you insist, and you want a healthy-enough ego to risk but not to get swallowed up by the biz of it. But I know what my publisher imparted, and how I clap for vital works: the author is the book’s best chance for triumph.

I had a crash course because of the pandemic. But I’ve also been in a community with generous, brilliant folks from before the book was even a thought. I had to lean on my people, and I’m so grateful I did. They are sharp, critical, and generous. Because YesYes Books is intuitive about the ecosystem of the work and how it lives in the world, there are some questions that are more industry-driven and less about process. YYB did the sales part great. The details of that weight were kept from me as much as possible. I’d already done my job in making, everything after was author-driven to support the book’s reach. I dreamt of a world where my book could thrive and YYB lifted me up in that. 

I’ve said how much I abhor capitalism, but also, the point is to get the work in front of as many people who can vibe with it as possible. That felt really important with my debut. I had to have a space not to be an editor, a Board member, or an educator. I needed to have my work diligently be held in the way it deserved.

IJ: The book pulls its title from the final line in “Consent Is A Labyrinth Of Yes:” “Nothing stands still Starkness and light Her salt body, shadow and shimmer Her afraid but not yet done not yet.” Salt and Body seem to coincide with one another; salt comes from the human body: “I’ve learned the salt of the earth art of settling, / my body fatigued, progeny of two small Mississippi towns, / their lightning bugs fat like dream songs trapped in a mason jar” and bodies of oceans: “I learned two things: I was not the first / of our line to hold a fraction of the sea’s language, / salt degrading the world’s fragile questions.” I can physically see the bodies opened and closed across the book: “[…] and its orange corona was the tree and scaled skin pressed into there or was a boy between my body the tree speaking nothing of consequence was time buffering […].” Yet the word ‘shimmer’ only appears on page 41. What was the choice behind ‘shimmer’ being in the title if it is not as pronounced in the book? 

AF: The book is shimmer too, in that it’s the iridescent-vital that hums all over the landscape, apprehended amongst the noise if you pay attention. We talk a lot about the Black lives as site, as anchor, as transactional. And through insistence, we demand: Imagine! Dream!

If we give ourselves space and quietude, we recognize ourselves as crystals turning in the light. Perhaps that’s the healing you notice. Perhaps that’s the salve we always knew was there. We just didn’t have a name for it. Not yet, but I’m writing to find out. 

Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL engaging poetry with photography & video.

Illustration by Harmeet Rehal.

The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this interview, Sarah Ghazal Ali spoke with Kashmiri poet Sanna Wani about her debut collection, My Grief, the Sun, out now from House of Anansi. We invited Toronto-based visual artist Harmeet Rehal to respond to Sanna’s debut. We hope the interview paired with art offers a fruitful, meditative experience as you read. 

“Any assertion of meaning is strange and striking.” —Sanna Wani

My Grief, the Sun by Sanna Wani: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain 

SA: I’m curious about your relationship to epigraphs and “after” poems, which are particularly present in the first section of the book. I wonder if we could begin with a question of lineage or relationality—are there larger contexts or conversations that you’d say your book emerges from, or joins, or responds to?

Wani: So many. First and foremost, the conversations and books of my life, written in the air. I’ve had to transcribe a lot of interviews and what I’m always struck by is the sheer volume of words we leave behind daily…Is there a more powerful vehicle for verse than a mouth? Every poem starts there for me. Then in text—I am drawn to thinking in terms of the word kinship. I do this thing with friends that I also do with books: I imprint. I fall in love and then circle back endlessly. I did this with Heather Christle’s THE TREES THE TREES, Billy Ray Belcourt’s THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, Yanyi’s THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER, my friend Roha. I like to write in a feeling of nearness. I like the texture of lingering. When I read a good poem, I usually want to write. Many of those after poems were made in feelings like that.

SA: Who is in the bibliography of My Grief, the Sun?

Wani: This is such a lovely question which—forgive me!—I’m going to answer with a plug! But later this spring, maybe in May, I’m doing a feature with the Syllabus project to literally create a syllabus aka bibliography for the book, especially around the themes of the title poem. The restorative properties of grief, the kaleidoscope of love. A sneak peak of that looks like: Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and Han Kang’s White Book. Some paintings by Remedios Varo. Arooj Aftab’s discography. My mama’s recipe for razma dal.

SA: In section IV, you write, “In the oldest language we know, intention means to stretch. / I am looking for a map. Something to mould touch.” I’m thinking now about how putting together a book can be an act of intention, or a stretching toward. This book is also full of beloveds— friends, contemporaries, and ancestors—and I’m interested in this choice to bring in and name others. Could you speak to this?

Wani: Totally! Thank you for seeing that so clearly. The line, that entire poem really, came out of a phone call and walk I took with my friend Francis early in the pandemic. Most poetry is born in community so it feels natural to me, to want the beloved present and named. There is also a question of privacy and ethics, which comes with naming, which I thought a lot about. I also have a background in anthropology and ethnography which maybe slips through here but I felt the need to share those poems in section four with everyone they named before the book came out. Some writers might think I’m compromising my art there—the Cat Person debate, right—but I just think that, even if the poem is mine first, it is not mine alone. Like any act of love, there needs to be consent. Consent, which is its own kind of intention. Intention, which can be a kind of love.

SA: The four distinct sections (some with subsections within them) are so carefully, thoughtfully rendered—I wonder how you arrived at the right structure, the right order for these poems. How did the book in its current form take shape? How did you bring the poems together?

Wani: I took the advice of a mentor, Canisia Lubrin, and printed everything then laid it out on the floor of our hamam in Kashmir, a room with no sofas, and just stared at everything together until it felt right. It took a few days. My parents were very confused. I would crouch over poems, I would throw poems away, I would decide entire sections needed to go then put them back in. A very physical process. Internally in sections, I paid a lot of attention to the beginnings and endings of poems. I wanted there to feel like there was a thread running through them even as it was unraveling. It became pretty clear pretty quickly which structure felt best because it felt fun. It was playful. I chose the order that got me excited and I’m a nerd so I get excited by patterns, by consistency and loose symmetry. I also only had four visual poems I really loved and so I let those be anchors. Pillars. The broader structure fell into place pretty easily after that. Well, easily might be a stretch. Editing a book can feel a bit like an exorcism, or birth. My friends think I’m unhinged for this but I actually (safely and with supervision) set the entire manuscript on fire after I was done. Great catharsis. I’m an Aries! I love ritual, and drama.

SA: Can you share your journey to publication? How did it all come to be through House of Anansi Press? How long did it take to find a home (or perhaps, the right home) for your book? 

Wani: In 2018, I attended the Anansi poetry bash in Toronto because one of my professors was there. I ended up really loving another poet’s work there, Mikko Harvey, and stayed aware of Anansi afterwards. Then in 2019, I applied and received one of the Ontario Arts Council’s Recommender grants via Anansi. I emailed them once the project was done to ask if they’d like to consider it and they did! That was “Forming Glory.” Kevin, my editor, got back to me about six months later and said he loved it but wanted more. We built the book together in the summer of 2021. It was originally something like three different manuscripts. Some of them had been floating around—and been rejected—for years. Some of them were unfinished and kind of remain so. Now they’ve found a life together, in the hodgepodge home of this book.

SA: Before I even began to read any of the poems, I flipped through and marveled at how formally diverse your book is. There are visual poems, ekphrastic poems, prose poems, maps, and an entire section of erasure poems that I wouldn’t have recognized as erasures had I not read the note about them in the back of the book.  Can you talk about some of the formal choices you implement throughout My Grief, the Sun? 

Wani: I’m always really happy when I hear people are keen on the diversity of my work. It makes me feel free to keep wandering. That’s my formal choice, if I’m going to be completely honest: to wander. I don’t plan to try new genres or styles of poems. I usually read or witness something in the genre that interests me, then carry that thought around in my back pocket for a couple of weeks. Then something sparks and I run to a computer or a blank sheet of paper and try it. The third visual poem in the collection, “Reaching”, is a great example of that. I was driving home from my friend’s house at midnight and I could see the shape of my hand in the poem already. The loop of the questions. I took the photo against the wall–all the visual poems are edited photos of my body–and edited it until like 4 am. There are at least sixty versions of that poem. It felt like being possessed. It felt like being alive.

SA: I’d love to hear your thoughts on erasure as practice in general.

Wani: I think a lot about erasure. Like everyone, I’ve read and reread Solmaz Sharif’s essay on it and spent time with Chase Berggrun, Robin Coste Lewis and Srikanth Reddy’s work as well. I have, buried somewhere in my computer, notes for a draft of an essay I wanted to write once. I had a line in the original acknowledgements of the draft I sent Kevin—back when the book was just section two—something about how there was a white man’s voice in that text and how I ate it. Sharif’s idea of erasure is a critical political intervention on the methodology of poetry. But when I think about Forming Glory, and what I was trying to say in that unfinished essay, I think about erasure not as obliteration but decomposition. hiI let van Ess’s text ferment in my voice for, like, two years. What is that term in kombucha making? A scoby? My mind, the bacteria. His voice, the tea. I poured myself into that text. By the end, it wasn’t that my voice had replaced his. His text still exists. It was that I had entered his voice looking for my own. In that kind of synthesis, we had become an entirely new thing, together.

Erasure is connected to after poems too. It was a process of salvage. I like mushrooms a lot and mushroom foraging. In the class I originally wrote these poems as the final assignment for, we learned a lot about histories of mystical Sufism, Muslim scientists and alchemy: people who had fantastic, magical and curious ideas about spirit, body and God. Scholars who were brave and strange and worth remembering and thinking with, buried behind this weird German professor who kept comparing Prophet Muhammed to Dante. My professor, Amira Mittermaier, said something like, “Even as they erased those histories, there’s something rich the Orientalist texts about Islam preserved.” I wanted to take that richness back. I wanted to make it mine.

SA: Yours is a book that holds close the natural world while simultaneously collapsing the less tangible borders between space, time, distance, and the divine. I’m deeply moved by the way these poems center astonishment and inquiry. Every poem beseeches, and I can’t uncouple these poems from prayer. Has faith or devotional / ritual practices of any kind influenced your writing?

Wani: Faith is always what I go back to. Poetry and faith are like twins in me. Usually I can tell them apart—sometimes I am struck by just how similar they are. Have you read that Frank O’Hara poem? “I wear work shirts to the opera”? “The better part of [my heart], my poetry”? That’s how I feel about them, the better parts of my heart. It doesn’t matter how far I feel from my community or my culture. Whenever the world wounds me, I pray. Whenever grace visits me, I pray. And whenever I pray, I feel like I’m inside God’s poems. “Every poem beseeches.” That’s such a precious and astute observation. To be seeking. That’s for sure what I’m doing. On my walks, sitting on my favorite bench, or on my jainimaaz, head bent in sajda. I am waiting to be astonished. It usually doesn’t take long—and even when it does, the slowness is the point. To sit inside a feeling and sink back into the world, like water in water. That’s George Bataille from Theory of Religion: “[The animal] moves [with the world] like water in water.” I am always trying to become the animal. I think God is another name for the world, the water.

Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri settler living near the Missinnihe river (Eastern Ojibwa: trusting waters), on land stewarded since time immemorial by the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudnosaunee among many other diverse First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. Sanna completed her MA in literary and environmental anthropology from the University of Toronto. She loves daisies.

The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this first interview, I.S. Jones speaks with Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti about the governing principles of her debut, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)—the process of putting together the manuscript, how faith and shame operated in her book, and how Chatti had to transform her thinking to view Mary, the book’s central figure, as a fully formed woman, not unlike Chatti herself.

Deluge by Leila Chatti: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain 

Jones: Prior to Deluge, you had two chapbooks Ebb & Tunsiya/Amrikiya. I am interested in how these chapbooks prepared you to take on a larger body of work. Was the drive to create Ebb different from the drive to create Tunsiya / Amrikiya?

Chatti: Yes, very! At the beginning of 2016, I set a resolution to put together a chapbook by the end of the year. I didn’t know then what that year would look like—violence across the world and in the United States (Nice, Brussels, Orlando), massive numbers of refugees displaced and endangered, and intensifying rage and despair during the presidential election, which of course culminated in Donald Trump becoming the 45^th president of the United States. I spent much of 2016 deeply unsettled and distracted, overwhelmed with the chaos and devastation I was witnessing. I had come to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in October to begin a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, but spent those first two months unable to focus, caught up in the news and my feelings about the news. When December came around, I remembered my promise to myself and decided I would try to meet that goal, to try and pivot in the direction of something good to dedicate my energy and attention to. I spent a week at my kitchen table in Provincetown putting Tunsiya/Amrikiya together. I had written most of the poems for it already that year and the year prior, and only had to write a few more, to balance the manuscript. I had originally thought of Tunsiya/Amrikiya as being two sister chapbooks—one titled Tunsiya, and the other Amrikiya, and actually still have the original files named that way—but when I sat down to look at my poems, I realized I couldn’t easily categorize them as being Tunisian or American, and that separating them that way would be impossible. The point was, of course, I was both; trying to separate what of me was Tunisian and what was American would be like trying to split myself in half. 

Ebb, on the other hand, came about completely—ah, unwillingly? What I mean is, unlike the poems in Tunsiya/Amrikiya, which I had been publishing steadily before putting them together as a manuscript, the poems in Ebb were private, secret poems, and I had not intended to ever share them. I had also written those poems in 2015 and 2016, but they had been what I consider “diary poems,” poems to make sense of things for myself (because poems are the form in which I process the events of my life, primarily). Ebb came about because a week after Tunsiya/Amrikiya was accepted for publication by Bull City Press, I received an e-mail from Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani inviting me to submit a chapbook for the New-Generation African Poets series.

Both projects, looking back on them now, prepared me for the much larger project of Deluge. I actually also wrote a substantial chunk of the poems in Deluge during 2015 and 2016 as well—it was a period of both great difficulty and great creativity for me. Looping back to the first story, my resolution in 2016—that spring, I was living with Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar, and things were still mostly calm in the world at that point, and I was happily getting ready to think about a chapbook. I looked at my poems and grouped them, as is my way. I realized I had all these Mary and health poems that were clearly in conversation—the illness at the center of Deluge had only just resolved, more or less, in the spring of the year earlier, 2015, and I had been writing poems during and following that experience—so many that I was right up against the page count for a chapbook. I brought them to Dorianne, who knew of my goal, and said I had enough poems for a chapbook but felt I had only just gotten started saying what I wanted to say, so what should I do—should I cut and condense? She took one look at it and said, “Leila, this isn’t a chapbook, this is your book.” And I was very, very afraid of that answer, because I didn’t feel I was ready to be writing my capital B book, and I certainly didn’t want it to be about that. 

Jones: Can you tell me when you realized you were in the middle of a book project? Sometimes a poet will be swept up by an obsession that they don’t understand they are in the middle of until they have drafted multiple poems speaking to each other. You were plagued by a severe chronic illness and dealt with chronic pain. I appreciate how you confront the complicated history of medicine when it comes to women’s bodies. When did you see Deluge begin to form into a full body of poems?

Chatti: Another pivotal moment for me in thinking about the book came when I was on a flight with Ross White, who would become my editor for Tunsiya/Amrikiya at Bull City Press but was not yet. We sat next to each other—I had gone to graduate school in Raleigh, and Bull City Press is in Durham, so we had met briefly before—and he asked if I was working on anything, and I showed him the first 20 or so poems of what would become Deluge. He read through it and then said I had two threads—faith and medicine—but he felt there was one more thread, one I hadn’t figured out yet. I was very interested in that thought and mulled it over for the next year in Provincetown, where I continued writing poems engaging with faith and illness. It wasn’t until right at the end of writing the book, when I was in Wisconsin, that I realized the final thread—shame. It had been there the whole time by not being there—like the white space that makes possible the trees. I had been avoiding talking about it directly without being consciously aware I was writing around something. 

But, suddenly, it was so clear to me—what was conspicuously unsaid. Truthfully, it was very hard for me to write about shame once I understood shame was what I had to write about. I was afraid of looking at it, afraid of engaging with it for fear that it might overwhelm me if I let down my guard (if we’re using a flood as a metaphor, it was the enormous wall of water behind a dam I could not imagine opening without losing control). I was also very aware of audience now, both people from my background and not, and was afraid of how both would react. A Muslim woman talking openly about her body and sexuality, her anger and hunger for God? No matter who looked at me, I was wrong—neither secular nor devout enough, not fully free nor obedient, the wrong kind of Muslim, the wrong kind of woman. I was afraid of being seen clearly. I was ashamed of my shame. But I knew if I wanted to write the real book, not the easy book or the book I “wanted,” which is the book I felt I could control, I had to address shame. Once I began to do that, that’s when Deluge opened up beyond my plans for it, became what it wanted—needed—to be.

Jones: I am fascinated with how shame functions in the book as it relates to the body and faith. I am not Muslim, but many of the teachings in the Celestial Church of Christ mirror those of the Islamic faith: women are not to sit next to men in church, women must cover their heads in God’s house, women who menstruate cannot touch the Bible or enter the church until they have been sanctified by a man in the church. In this way, Deluge is a deeply personal book for me, as it is a book for and about women, especially women whose lives are deeply intertwined with the Divine. I didn’t know this until Deluge, but Mary is the only woman in the Qur’an mentioned by name. The way your work makes parallels between the speaker and Mary—to humanize her—is incredibly powerful. I think it is critical to note that what is so powerful about Deluge is its commitment to reposition women (specifically Mary) in a way where they are human, more than a mere vessel to usher in the Savior of Man. 

Chatti: There’s something interesting about shame—no one seems to want to bring it up, but when we start talking about it, it’s hard to stop. I’ve had so many conversations—whispery, deeply intimate, trusting conversations—the past few years with women sparked from these poems, women who seem, like me, relieved to finally be talking about it, to know we’re not alone in this. It’s easier, now, for me to talk about it—shame doesn’t like being revealed to the light, and loses much of its power once it is. That revelation shows up in “Questions Directed Toward the Idea of Mary”—once we see our shame, understand it, we gain power over it, and that power can be made useful to us. 

I think if you’re raised in a faith, deeply, you never really shake it off; it becomes part of your DNA, a lens through which you see the world. Whether or not I want it, my experiences with religion, its values and stories, remain with me, are central to who I am. When I became sick, I turned to faith because that is what I had been raised to do, and when I had questions, my questions were directed toward God—what else could be expected? In the Abrahamic traditions, women are not the central players; the female experience is a secondary one, a narrative subsidiary to the masculine default. Nearly all other women are referred to by their relationships to men—wives, mothers. While I was not necessarily explicitly told I was less important, the ways the stories of my youth were told to me led me to believe this. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) emphasizes the importance of names: “You will be called on the Day of Resurrection by your names and the names of your fathers, so have good names.” So what does it mean, not to be named? Who calls for us? It’s an erasure, a silence.

For a long time, Mary was an idea more than a woman to me. I think it’s often like this for children—it’s hard for children to imagine those above them, those with power and respect, to be fully-fleshed out human beings. When I became sick, I was twenty-two years old, only just beginning to think of myself as not a child, primarily because I was in a context that forced me to view myself that way—I was a high school teacher, and the presence of actual children made it clear that I was no longer one. Once I felt that shift, once I was transformed into an idea by my students and knew, of course, that I was more than that, I had this realization that kept unfolding: first that the adults I knew must be more complex than I, as a child, had imagined them, and then that everyone was. This eventually led me to consider more deeply Mary. If I were to believe in my faith, I needed to believe that Mary had once existed, was a real woman—and a real girl—and that opened all sorts of questions for me. Could I imagine, for example, Mary’s menarche? Mary playing, Mary experiencing desire, Mary afraid? When I became sick, I felt stripped of my agency, and I wondered about how Mary felt, “blessed” with a child she hadn’t asked for. How would it feel to be chosen by God, to be faced with an angel, in adolescence? What choices would someone realistically have in that context? It all really broke open for me when I returned to the Qur’an and read the passage I quote in the epigraph of the first poem of Deluge, “Confession:” while Mary was giving birth, she cried out, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” Mary’s pain made her human. I was struck by Mary’s vulnerability, her fierce refusal—that there was a moment, at the very least one, where she would have rejected God’s plan for her, where she would have chosen a different story. 

Jones: I am curious about the decisions made while ordering your manuscript, which seems to follow an ordering by word association. For example, in “Mother,” the final lines are “And I’d tell you the shame of it: / the feminine failure / its ache a reminder—at the center the tumor / ballooning like hope.” This then brings us to the poem “Tumor.” Can you speak more to the choices and the logic behind the structure, the arc you wanted readers to follow? How did you bring together poems that may have been written years apart from each other? 

Chatti: A great question! The ordering was a significant challenge for me. I did write the poems over a period of time—the first one came about in 2013, the last in 2018—and had not, in the beginning, imagined I was writing a book. I didn’t have a plan laid out. I actually reached out to some mentors and friends about how I might think about ordering; I say “actually” because I’m very, very private about my work while I’m working on it, and rarely reveal anything unless I’m certain it’s done. Gregory Pardlo was someone who helped talk me through different ways of thinking about the arc and order. I knew the obvious answer was to order it chronologically—first I became sick, then I got sicker, then it was fixed, and at the end, I was better—but this didn’t feel right, and Greg agreed. He said something that really stuck with me. He said, “You know, that you’re okay in the end isn’t a mystery you have to hold out from the reader—of course you survived! You wrote the book!” It clicked for me. The turning point toward wellness wasn’t the climax, the great reveal—once I was freed of that idea, I could think about what I was actually working toward, outside of the linear structure of time. 

Originally, the first draft of Deluge did not have sections. That version existed for maybe six months after I finished its final poem. It felt thick, swollen, without room to breathe, and I knew it wasn’t right but I didn’t have a sense of how to correct it. I was in Ireland for a residency that summer when I began to think about sections, and the version I organized it into there is the one that is now the book. I had this extremely complicated system of notes and categories—a number of charts in my notebook, in addition to the entirety of the book on notecards, with a poem on one side and a complex series of symbols and color-coding on the back—and this system helped me to have a really clear view of what was happening in the book both on the poem level and overall. I was very deliberate about my choices; I appreciate that you noted how “Mother” leads into “Tumor,” which was part of this thinking. It was a daunting task, to pull together all these poems with different registers and shapes and concerns. I thought about images as links from one poem to another, but also tone. I didn’t want a series of poems that were all left-aligned blocks, or a number of traditional forms or prose poems in a row. It was important for me to think about breath in the manuscript, moments for silence or pause. In my first version, it was too intense for too long—the book, I think, is pretty intense overall, and even I who created it felt I couldn’t keep reading at that heightened level for more than a handful of pages—so I wanted to fold in moments of quiet, if not relief; tension and release, tension and release. The sections allowed for that, both within them and at their breaks. Having sections also allowed me to pivot—the second major section, for example, kind of does a circling back to pre-sickness, to adolescence. It interrupts the chronological narrative. 

One last note about my thoughts and intentions in regard to structure: the massive poem, “Awrah,” was an interesting one to place. I’d received some suggestions to put it in the middle of the book. I chose to put it near the end, because I wanted there to be this energy near the end, that the end is never really the end—while one might expect relief following the surgery and recovery, I wanted to disrupt that expectation for a comfortable, complete resolution. The truth is, it (what I experienced, what I learned, what I felt) isn’t over—it’s just different, at a further point in a story still revealing itself to me. And “Deluge,” the final poem, the hefty cento—that poem was the only poem that could have been there. The ending had to be messy, to be uncertain, overwhelming. The cento goes in many directions, the speaker(s) within often contradicting what is said earlier in the same poem or even in the line prior, and this is intentional, it’s how I felt—yes, God, I need you, and yes, God, I turn my back, and yes, God, where are you, and yes, God, you are here, oh God, my God, no, yes, O! Everything at once. 

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection 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, and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, Best New Poets (2015 & 2017), and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.