Book Review: "Deluge" by Leila Chatti
Faith, Blood, and Shame: Turning the Body into Sacred Text
Book: Deluge
Author: Leila Chatti
Publication Date: 2020
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Where To Buy: Bookshop.Org
Overview
This collection by Leila Chatti is full of deeply personal poems that deal with menstruation, miscarriage, the struggle to conceive, and reproductive cancer. Chatti, a Muslim, uses the Quran and the Bible throughout, coming back to figures like Mother Mary and Haemorrhoissa again and again.
Mary is the most common theme, arising often in relation to conception and birth, and the collection opens with a poem about Mary which begins with an epigraph from the Quran about her giving birth and how vulnerable and human she is in that moment.
Chatti uses Haemorrhoissa —a woman from the Bible whom Jesus cured of her constant bleeding— to explore menarche and what it would be like to be suddenly cured of irregular menstrual bleeding.
Although Chatti’s Muslim faith is evident, she also isn’t afraid to criticize the shame of menstruation that religion instilled in her, and the idea of being impure.
Blood permeates this collection—whether it’s the verbs (seeping, leaking, sluicing), the many metaphors she uses to describe red, or the droplet symbols that separate the sections.
In terms of style, Chatti uses sentence fragments and dashes often, giving the lines an abrupt, immediate feel. Her word choice is frequently archaic and obscure (for instance, cortege means solemn procession, and gimcrack means something poorly made but attractive). She also experiments with form—writing found-word poems, using black boxes to obscure text, and creating poems that can be read both left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
“Menorrhagia”
In “Menorrhagia” (p. 20), Chatti explores what it’s like to bleed heavily during menstruation. It is a block poem composed entirely of sentence fragments and begins with an amusing tone:
“Christmas, flew home packaged like a gift. Beneath my jeans a childlike padding. Came to adore the wee god, his dolorous mother. All the while bleeding like a can of cherries.”
Chatti addresses what it feels like to wear pads that feel like diapers—how infantilizing it can be—but she also makes light of it. The juxtaposition of herself, menstruating, and the “wee god” of Jesus with his “dolorous mother” is funny.
The simile comparing menstruation to a can of cherries is surprising, comic, and invokes both the sugar overload of the holiday season and the over-the-top redness of canned cherries to talk about a painful, debilitating condition.
Throughout the poem, Chatti contrasts red imagery with white winter scenes:
“glaucous store windows spotted with ashen, ineffectual stars,”
“porcelain snowbanks,”
the airplane described as “niveous.”
This gives the poem a vivid winter quality—blood on fresh snow.
She riffs on Christmas carols to describe her condition, making the tone amusing and disturbing at once:
“Each night a night silent and wholly unbearable.”
Here she replaces holy with wholly unbearable in a clever turn of phrase, then quotes directly:
“Fall on your knees. Collapsed sudden in a vestibule. O hear the angel voices. Rose fevered, soaked with slush.”
Chatti paints a Christmas that is a bit nightmarish, especially in the final lines as she flies home again:
“Leaned feebly against the pane. The cities rutilant, scarred by streets. The lakes spattered black and viscous.”
This is an image of an exhausted woman identifying with a bleak winter landscape. The final sentence likens the natural world to her internal struggle:
“The sky blushing as if shamed.”
While the poem opened on a funny note, it ends with shame—driving home that Chatti’s struggle goes far beyond the physical.
“Etiology”
In “Etiology” Chatti writes about shame from the perspective of a teenage girl exploring her sexuality and experiencing sexual assault. Etiology means the origin of a disease; here it may refer to the origin of shame in Chatti’s life, or to shame as a vicious cycle that subjugates women.
Every time the word shame appears, it is blocked out by a black box—yet the meaning is clear from context, a clever device showing the censoring power of shame:
“they said it—you will bring [black box] upon your father you will bring [black box] upon your family.”
The religious overtones are unmistakable.
The poem is written in an avant-garde style: large gaps mid-line, no punctuation, enjambment that makes the ideas bleed together—mirroring shame’s snowball effect.
“I was 13 I was in love when with him I felt [black box] when he said I could hurt you so easily I said good I deserved it I didn’t know how to stop I knew [black box] followed me like a strange dog into the house.”
The closing lines reveal the strict culture she was raised in, where singing pop songs and showing skin were acts of rebellion:
“I was [black box]-filled I was [black box]less I sang Genie in a Bottle I moved my hips / I wore my skin where everyone could see it.”
Ending on see it is powerful—it asserts agency, a refusal to be confined, and an awareness of the structures she has overcome.
Conclusion
In Deluge, Leila Chatti demonstrates that she is a poet unafraid to explore taboo subjects in surprising ways. Although the collection revisits similar themes, each poem takes a fresh angle. The deeply physical and heavy topics are treated with a wide range of attitudes—from humor to reverence to despair—offering readers a well-rounded sense of what it’s like to live with a life-altering illness that makes menstruation intensely painful.
Laura Grace Hitt is a writer and naturalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University, and is pursuing an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Her work has appeared in the Santa Fe Reporter, Alligator Juniper, Slush Pile, Plain China, the Adventure Scientists blog, and the National Geographic Voices blog. She enjoys birding, podcasts, and staring off into space. www.lauragracehitt.com
The Inkwell is published by Ink & Ribbon Press — a nonprofit poetry publisher dedicated to craft, discovery, and the permanence of the printed word.
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