Kathryn Knight Sonntag (courtesy the artist)
“I recently read Leila Chatti’s Deluge and was awed by her unflinching gaze at chronic illness,” says Kathryn Knight Sonntag, a writer, poet and landscape architect who lives in Salt Lake City. “In her twenties, Chatti, a young Arab-American woman, started bleeding and didn’t stop. Her physicians referred to her condition as flooding. With each poem she blends the mythic and the real, wrestling with her religion’s view of women and idea of disease as punishment; she claims her own body as a worthy subject of art and life.”
For our Poetry in Pajamas series, Sonntag reads “Still Life with Hemorrhage” from Chatti’s collection.
Chatti’s work resonates with Sonntag’s own interest in the feminine experience, and in blood. “We are overexposed to bloodshed through the media but are less comfortable with bloodshed in the life-death-life cycle inherent in women’s bodies,” she says. She says her own poem, “Resolutions Become a Litany for Undoing,” just published in the Spring issue of Colorado Review, “turns the reader’s gaze to the emotional and physical landscapes of pregnancy loss, and the thread of grief that can weave from one generation to the next.”
Sonntag’s poems have appeared recently in Ethel, Rock & Sling, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild (Torrey House Press, 2020). She is the author of two books, The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019) and The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother (Faith Matters Publishing, 2022). You’ll find more about the writer at kathrynknightsonntag.com.
Running annually during the month of April, Poets in Pajamas invites Utah poets to read from their own work and the work of a poet they admire.
Categories: Literary Arts | Poets in Pajamas
Surely women have always written powerful poetry from their experiences, but now that those poems are freely distributed they have become a welcome deluge. It does my broken heart good to hear what was once a cause of shame celebrated today as a source of pride. Thank you for allowing this non-binary geezer to share things today that were not available when he needed them most.