Aisha Sasha John, total

 

THE HURRICANE VS. MYMOTHER’S COUNTRY

TO LAY IN BED AND HAVESOUP

BROUGHT TO ME AN ALSO

A COMMUNITY

INTELLECTUAL INTIMACY WITHELDERS

ONTARIO STRAWBERRIES

ROOM ADEQUATELY AISHA’D

ON SHOULD I LEAVE THEHOUSE

37 ON SATURDAY(““CONTINUANCE SYNONYM””)

Thelatest poetry title from Canadian performer, choreographer and poet Aisha Sasha John is total (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025), following TheShining Material (Book*hug, 2011), THOU (Book*hug,2014) [see my review of such here] and I have to live. (McClelland andStewart, 2017) [see my review of such here]. I’ve always appreciated the wayJohn establishes movement and motion in her work, and the poems in thiscollection offer an urgency, a lyric of declarations and determinations, with agood percentage of the poems held in all caps to highlight her declarative,propulsive sentences. “INSIDE, ALONE, OKAY,” the poem “THE TIME TO QUIT AND BEQUIET” writes, “AND DID NEITHER CARE NOR LIKE // ABOUT WHAT I COULD NOT KNOWNOR NEEDN’T // I SAID TO THE CAT GET AWAY FROM MY BREAD! // GET AWAY FROM MYBUTTER, I SAID // (TO THE CAT) [.]” Hers is a lyric of agency, of urgency; ofdeclaratives and celebratory movement, and even those intimate moments at home,alone, with her beloved cat. Her cat appears enough through the poems that I’mreminded of Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s own instances ofincluding her own cat within poems, but in total, Aisha Sasha John’s catserves as a kind of grounding, meandering in and out of the text very much ontheir own terms, no matter what the narrative might be doing or saying,entering the action at random in the ways that only cats can manage. As hersequence “THE PLACE ELEGANCE ARGUES GRACE” writes:

DREAM OF BELLY BUTTONBETWEEN MY BREASTS
CLOAKED IN LABIA 

THAT MY RAGE MODELS HAVEBEEN MALE RAPPERS

FROM HEARING TO HEEDING

DEAR GOD: WHO AM ME?

THE CAT JUST UPCHUCKED ANDRE-ATE HER
CHICKEN TREAT

Builtacross eight sections of deep and expansive observational declarations, even thetrajectory of section-titles offers its own rich, narrative thread: “WOLF /NEST / PEACE OF MEET,” “I AM NEW TO EVENINGS.,” “THE SPIRITS IN THE CORNER ANDTHE CAT,” “I AM ‘SELFISH’ AND I AM RICH.,” “YOU’VE CALLED FAITH ‘GOD’ AND DOUBT‘THE DEVIL’,” “BUT THEN I THOUGHT WHAT IS WILDNESS, OR WHAT WORTH IS WILDNESS,WITHOUT THE STRUCTURE OF DEVOTION,” “‘ONE’S PERSONAL HISTORY, WHATEVER ELSE ITIS, IS A HISTORY OF ONE’S OBEDIENCE’” and “‘I DO FEEL SOMETHING BACK HERE. BUTIT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE PAIN. IT FEELS LIKE KNOWLEDGE.’” “FIGURED OUT WHAT AGALLERY IS/DOES,” she writes, as part of “HOW DID A NUB OF GINGER END UP I THEBED?,” ‘THEY ARE LIKE CHURCHES WHERE ONE CAN PURCHASE / THE FURNITURE [.]” Aperformer and choreographer, as well as a poet, Aisha Sasha John utilizes danceand movement in ways very different than Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams has,through her chapbook-length multidisciplinary poetry-dance work Grapple(above/ground press, 2016), or Brooklyn poet Brenda Iijima, through her choreographicaccount of somatic involvements in her expansive book-length poem Bionic Communality (New York NY: Roof Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Inmany ways, the poems of total feel less akin to poems than a performanceset as text, utilizing the poem purely as the form through which Aisha Sasha John’sgestures are provided form, a form propelled through the very movement of herspeech, one set through desire and an almost liquid motion. If Christian Bök,as I’ve previously argued, is a conceptual artist (as opposed to a “workingpoet”) who just happens to be working within the form of the poem, Aisha SashaJohn’s total feels akin to a one-woman dance and performance project, movingthrough the ebbs and flow of a singular performance, one that is deeply set toa particular music that shines through and across her language.

WE ACCESS THE MIRACLE

Through ease
Is the hypothesis.
The task is to sourcefrom the quiet 

Instruction
And from confusion
The instinct organized 

As impulse and
Into my arms asextension.
I walk back to the hotel 

With two limes and awatermelon.
Tonight:
Water and watermelon.