Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press
… All night I listen
for you listening. If there
is something you need
to tell me, God, you must
tell it to me
yourself.
—from “Annunciation”
HOW IT BEGAN: I first became sick—or realized I was sick—in 2012, the year I applied to MFA programs.; I would go to class, then to the hospital, and then return home to write my poems for workshop. I wrote the initial poems in not because I imagined I was writing a book, but because I was learning how to write and because I desperately wanted to understand my experience; poems were how I processed and grieved. It wasn’t until a year after my graduation, when I was living with my mentor Dorianne Laux, trying to sort out what to do next with my life, that I realized, with her insight, I had begun a book. What compelled me to the book were the questions writing unearthed for me and the understanding that my specific experience of misogyny—in faith, medicine, and literature—was part of a larger, urgent problem I couldn’t look away from.
