Second Acts: A Second Look at Two Recent Second Books of Poetry
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
Wildness Before Something Sublime, By Leila Chatti (Copper Canyon, 2025)
Tantrums in Air, by Emily Skillings (The Song Cave, 2025)
“Second books are strange animals,” Emily Skillings writes in the Acknowledgments to her second collection of poetry, Tantrums in Air. And strange they are—charged with creative energies and forces that are rooted in the often long longed-for seedbed of a poet’s first full-length collection but, one hopes, extending the promise of those debut collections in new and surprising ways. Both writer and reader come to a sophomore poetry collection—lifted out of the journal, the phone, the laptop, and embodied as a physical book—with anticipation, expectations, apprehensions, wishes. Will the second book confirm the intrepid originality of the first? Will it veer into unexpected territory? Will its risks (successes and flaws) suggest a tentative tiptoeing through already rehearsed material or portend a career of continually refreshed and inventive praxis?
Two second books published or soon to be published in 2025, Leila Chatti’s Wildness Before Something Sublime and Emily Skillings’s Tantrums in Air, follow the undertakings of their much lauded first collections with distinctive moxie. These poets share some poetic DNA—both are concerned in first-person lyric modalities with somatic and cultural notions of femininity. Both explore nocturnal, oneiric terrain as they search for and tease out vexed, shadow, and phantom/ulterior manifestations of the self—the self consumed by loss, doubt, dread, trauma, desire. Mirrors abound in both books. Each poet often writes back and toward other writers. And, in different ways, each poet is engaged with the relationship of language to sentience. To thought. To being. Yet the poets contrast in their inhabitation of the first-person lyric. Chatti offers a fairly forthright lexicon, unafraid to speak plainly, to lean into abstractions, to confess. Skillings is more antic, oblique, and gnomically playful.
Neither Skillings nor Chatti can be considered an “emerging” writer. Both have received significant national attention and have authored or co-authored several chapbooks in addition to their first and now second full-length collections. Chatti’s full-length debut, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), won the Levis Reading Prize and the Luschei Prize for African Poetry (both in 2021) and was long-listed for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Interestingly, though she’s now had quite a bit of success as a poet (including coveted fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing at Cleveland State University), and while she often speaks of her poetry as her lifeblood, literally (“I had to write poetry,” she says in “On Not Writing: Wildness as Process and Processing,” a poetics statement of sorts that concludes the second book, “poetry paid my rent”), Chatti didn’t study creative writing as an undergraduate and had a first career as a special education teacher. In poems that have been called both defiant and devotional, Deluge recounts a young woman’s experience of suffering a life-threatening uterine tumor and the ways in which her body’s attendant “deluge” of bleeding was received with shame, taboo, and sexism by an array of religious and cultural sources. A Tunisian-American, born to a Muslim father and Catholic mother, Chatti explores the ways in which both religion and the U.S. medical system, often considered salvific institutions, can also be stridently and cruelly sexist. As Chatti attempts to survive and make meaning from her ordeal, Deluge gathers to itself several poetry “mother” figures (Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, Mary Szybist, among many others), as well as, especially, the Biblical Mary, whose story of annunciation—a mix of lack of agency and somatic power—resonates with Chatti’s own bodily and spiritual ordeal.
Wildness Before Something Sublime, clocking in at 145 pages including Notes and Acknowledgments, is lengthy for a collection of poems that is not a “new and selected” volume. Although traditional page-counts for poetry collections (48 or 64) tend to be dictated by folios, an editor once told me—as I was putting together a volume of my own—that an intentionally curated book of poems needed to have a very good reason to extend beyond 70 or so pages. And the image palette of the book’s 84 poems is closely keyed, a lexical mixology of oft-repeated words (wild, mirror, pain, light, sky, night, dream, suffer, clouds, lakes, wound, angels, self) in poems that often bear the same title (“Postcard,” “Night Poem,” or a variation on a title—“On Pain,” “On Loss,” “On Self,” “On Silence”). There is a timelessness to Chatti’s poems; they often feel—in their frank, direct expressions of pain and wonder—as though they might have been written in or translated from any century—the speaker could be, at times, a Tang Dynasty poet or a medieval mystic.
On one level, the book is driven by a woman’s unsuccessful attempts to bear a child, to carry a child to birth, and the attendant postpartum depression that ensues, her loss exacerbated by insomnia, doubt, debilitating writer’s block (“This book was written when I wasn’t writing,” Chatti says in an “Author’s Note” that precedes the poems), and the isolation of the global pandemic. But I think that the real engine of this book, and the justification for its length and its formal approaches, is a desire to move past the temptation, as Adrienne Rich puts it in one of her love poems, “to make a career of pain.” In “Goatsong,” Chatti’s speaker rues “the wrong / I’ve done. All the love / that didn’t serve me,” going on to say, “This sorrow has helped / make my career.” In another poem, “Seaside,” Chatti writes, “I’ve tried,”
Years. To change my suffering, my ways
of seeing if. My failures in this
have made my career, have brought me
here. You can hear the roar
with the door open, which I’ve done.
To do this kind of work of soul- and self-making—of turning away from the temptation to make a “career of pain”—is arduous, and Chatti does not shy away from the sometimes torturous protraction and limbo of suffering through a period when poems didn’t come as fluidly as they came in her first collection. In some ways, then, this collection is a breviary or field guide for how to wrestle one’s way through the briary impediments of writer’s block. Chatti devises several Anne Carsonian “ruses” (Chatti calls them “codes”) to trick the poems into being despite their author’s being in a fallow period of despair, which she explicates in both her Author’s Note and the book’s closing essay. The book is given in five parts. In ORACLE, Chatti draws, as she did in Deluge, on the poems of soul-sister poets, engaging with their words (in anagrams, in variations of the Golden Shovel form, and in an invented form she calls the “Golden Hinge,” in borrowed word hoards, in “photo-negative poems,” a form she calls “The Antipode,” etc.) in order to generate poems of her own. The poems in DIVINE are crafted by what Chatti calls a process of “divination”: riffling through several books by writers she admires until something sticks and becomes the germ of her own piece. The section NIGHT POEMS contains poems written on the speaker’s phone after she’s in bed, working in a kind of Surrealist automatic writing mode, letting dream-logic take her words where they will. The poems in AFTER THOUGHT and SHADOW/SELF are, as Chatti puts it, “the poems that arrived once I learned again, at last, how to move out of my mind’s way.”
More than once, making my way through the “wildness” of this collection, I thought of the film The Wizard of Oz. Many of the poems in the first part of the book feel monochromatic, black and white, sharing the grainy photo-negative interior moonscapes of the ultrasound screen, “black // photographs / of emptiness // distant language / cold and incomprehensible // hours / full of nothing and everything” (from “Archaeologist of the Disappeared”). And it feels necessary to go through these stations of the journey alongside our narrator in order to appreciate fully what it means to arrive (the film turning techno-color here) at the poems written when the speaker allows herself “to move out of my mind’s way.”
In “Someday I’ll Love Leila Chatti,” the book’s penultimate poem, Chatti addresses the self in the second-person:
Have you noticed? The stars
do not spell suffering;
there’s no prophecy in that disorder
of infinite dark, no script.
Misery is not your inheritance.
Your hurt in time will soften
like green beneath
the presence of deer.
If belief’s beyond, just be
until it’s here. You’ll see.
The sacred inside
is not extinguished.
Blood is the mother
of blessing and your veins
run hot with God. . . .
Wilderness Before Something Sublime is a brave testament to one poet’s emotional fortitude in a dark time. It is also testimony to how a second (or next) book can come into being by confronting obstacles directly and by foregrounding process over “product,” question over answer, with lessons in doing so for all writers.
Emily Skillings’s first full-length book of poetry, Fort Not, appeared from The Song Cave in 2017. The book was called “a savagely brilliant debut” by the late, great John Ashbery, an anthology of whose unfinished work, Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works, Skillings edited for Ecco in 2021. She is also the author of two chapbooks and the co-author of another. Her awards include support from the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings, who teaches at Yale, NYU, and Columbia, is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective.
In her prefatory remarks for a 2022 Washington Square Review interview with Skillings, Neha Mulay describes Skillings’s debut collection this way:
Her collection of poems, Fort Not, is cleaved in a radical oddity of dissection that deftly moves between the mind’s examination of itself and formative contemplation with clean cuts of the poetic scalpel. It’s simultaneously cavalier and furious, inventive and reactionary, seeking without being sought . . . . Skillings’ gaze is sharp and astute, irresolute, stubborn, and wry, with just a touch of an enchanted lightness, a quirk of graphic consideration that creates bifurcated kingdoms: “The daylight is scrolling itself to death. / Everything presses into an atmospheric parfait.”
I quote Mulay at some length because her insights into Skillings’s work attest to the witty, nimble, almost febrile linguistic escapades already at play in Skillings’s first collection. Mulay’s words offer a portal, or “hole” (to borrow a favorite word of Skillings), into the work to come. Tantrums in Air leans into and deepens the obsessions of the first book—the frictions, intrusions, and vicissitudes of consumerism, pop culture, and technology, for example, but also, perhaps chiefly, what it means to think, to feel not “smart” in the usual ways, to embrace imposter syndrome, the necessity of lying, and to explore a meta interrogation/celebration of otherly abled ways of knowing: “the feeling / of coming so close to my own mind / but only being able to visit,” as she puts it in “Lavender Lake,” a poetic Bildungsroman of sorts at the heart of Tantrums in Air. “Lavender Lake,” like many other poems in the collection, suggests that thinking and understanding are uniquely constructed of words—words in all their beauty, ugliness, and capriciousness.
At nearly 130 pages, Tantrums is also a relatively long book, but it contains only 34 poems, among them many long poems, à la John Ashbery, including the 7-page “Lavender Lake” and the 14-poem sequence, “Tantrums in Air.” Each of the poems in this latter series is comprised of 14-lines (or 14 words, in one instance). Terrance Hayes has called the sonnet a combination of a meat grinder and a music box. A similar mix of volant lyricism and wrenching obstructions/interruptions/voltas (created through diction, the line, the image) (think Dickinson’s phrase “Maelstrom, with a notch”) allows Skillings to make of her “tantrums” a unique sonnet-haunted form. Here is the second “tantrum” in the series:
I could die here
in my poem
just to give it
a try: boom.
“guilt-free”
as they say
is it perennial or
perineum—and was she
astonished? Lady Time
with her nautilus head
cradling a glass
raspberry. Anesthesia
such a pretty name
for a girl
The poem begins audaciously, even flippantly, but by “guilt-free” Skillings is already teasing out the ways in which commodification (even in poetry) can oversimplify culpability (“guilt-free”!), and suddenly language itself is exposed for its capacity for fickleness (perennial or perineum? Eternity or mortality?). The swerve in the penultimate stanza into an almost Hieronymus Bosch-like surrealism calls up phantasmagoric notions of the Garden of Earthly Delights that sends us plummeting in the final couplet into a tantalizing oblivion.
The sonnet-ghosted poems in the “Tantrums in Air” sequence exemplify in a condensed way the shimmering, almost hypertextual movements of the book’s other poems and of the collection itself. In “The Bee Eater and the Chamomile,” for instance, the poet and a companion are on a sweaty walk observing flora and fauna, considering as they traipse along a reservoir how odd it was “to think of drinking / What we saw, but / Sometimes I need to pause and / Construct images / To keep sane and remember / The surreal order of things.” And then, as if to embody that “surreal order,” as her companion takes photos of flowers, the speaker finds herself tempted to speak to him about a misstep she thinks he’s made the night before, but instead she passes him the bug spray and swerves tangentially to say how much she dislikes that
. . . I can choose any painting
From any major museum
Or historical period
And if the resolution is high enough
Can have it printed onto a pair
Of XL booty shorts
And they’ll arrive at my house in 3-5 days
And if ever I am anxious
About their whereabouts I can press
A sequence of letters and numbers
To know their every move. Across state lines
And into warehouses for holding
And redirecting . . .
In yet another turn, the speaker then imagines what this painting (of “The Head of John the Baptist, maybe?) might look like—the severed head, the plate, a sword—stretched over her “giant ass” and “crotch,” until, finally, she’s inhabiting the painting itself and, like a character in it, a servant girl who is emerging from behind a curtain,
. . . She isn’t paying attention. It’s a cool day
She is thinking of a boy, his moving throat
While last night’s rain
Collects in all the low places
Of the earth
This is not stream of consciousness, exactly, but the poem enacts a movement of the mind. The mind undertaking, understanding. The poem ends where it begins, in the natural world. Heads are still intact, desire palpable. This is not the mind on drugs, but the mind on wordplay. In an especially meta poem, “Electric,” the speaker dreams that she has written a poem called “Electric,” and
Somehow I got the t in the middle of the title
to wiggle. All the words of the poem
were crossed out with clay-colored lines
that ran through like fences or wires.
I could only see the tops and bottoms of the letters.
when I scraped the words of the poem with a knife
like a scratch card, the text remained hidden
behind opalescent scars
which hovered and shifted “cloud-like”
wherever my eyes rested. I put the shavings
under a big lens, and it seemed to me that was the real poem . . .
Like a manuscript page of an Emily Dickinson poem, with its dinosaur-track scrawl and midden heaps of word variants, Skillings’s dazzling poems always refuse the limits of the page (and the mind) even as they acutely attend to lineation, margins, voltas, and the sonic and etymological slippages of the words we use to make and unmake worlds.
