On a recent four-hour train ride across France, I pulled Leila Chatti’s debut poetry collection, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) out of my bag, knowing nothing about it except that it had been recommended by a friend. The book’s urgency caught me immediately. It felt like its poems were written close to the veil between worlds, written because they had to be.
Composed over the course of a serious illness that first manifested with excessive bleeding called “flooding,” the collection explores the many taboos related to female bodies. Chatti wrestles with the love of—and for—the God of her mother’s Catholicism and her father’s Islam, religions in which the woman most worthy of honor is a virginal mother, something none of us can be.
The best way to recommend Deluge is perhaps simply to share some of Chatti’s beautifully crafted, captivating poetry. Here’s a portion of the poem “Mother,” one I’ve come back to often since first reading the book that day on the train, barreling forward through space and time, hoping to eventually arrive somewhere new.
I was just beginning
to understand the possibilities, my body’s
elusive, independent workings, machineries
chugging away in dark chambers
not just left to but simply
their own devices, unknowable and sovereign.
What I wanted, always, to be:
in control. And I know this was
impossible, just as I knew, even then, that
to be a mother was to be the only
permissible form of a woman, the begrudging
exception to the rule of our worth-
lessness.
— Alice White is an American poet who lives in France. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, The Ex-Puritan, The Poetry Review, and The Threepenny Review, and has been featured on the podcast The Slowdown. She can be found at poetalicewhite.com
You can read Alice White's poem "I felt it once —" in Issue 303 (Spring 2025). Order the issue now:
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