Aisha Sasha John is a dancer. Aisha Sasha John writes in ALL CAPS. Aisha Sasha John is a wise woman/wise guy; is funny/not funny. Aisha Sasha John is not on the Internet as much as you might expect for someone who writes as if large portions of the Internet are being continuously generated out of her frontal lobes. She has a website, but it’s pretty spare. Links go to “404 Not Found.” Pages are mostly white space, with abbreviated lines of text looking rather like John’s poetry.
Here is a bit of that poetry, from the opening of total, to give you a feeling for it:
TOTAL
AS IN, MY/OUR VALUE IS, THANKS
“THE END”
total is John’s fourth book of poetry. Her first, THOU (Book*hug Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her second, i have to live (Mclelland & Stewart, 2017) was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. The judges’ citation for that latter award speaks to the disarming simplicity of her poetic voice: “Spontaneous, its subjects unposed, its language unrehearsed, each poem has the effect of being taken with a polaroid camera. John writes poems … whose casual demeanour belie their fight against casualty.”
John’s style throughout total sustains remarkable tension, where she’s both confessional and cool, intense yet distant. We’re given intimate glimpses of the poet-character, but these are so fragmentary that the work of adding it all up devolves upon us readers, who fill in the gaps to create a composite character that’s part John, part self. If we feel uncomfortable mingling our sedentary, readerly selves with John’s depth and fire, all the better. Discomfort drives movement. This collection is moving, not in a soppy, emotional sense, but in the sense that dance is movement, that reading causes a physical alteration of brain state.
Portions of total were workshopped via Toronto Dance Theatre, and some of the poems underwent a collaborative multilingual translation process as part of the VERSschmuggel / reVERSible project published in book form by Book*hug Press in 2021. Comparison with earlier versions brings out the modularity of John’s work, how she assembles poems out of bite-size pieces that can be swapped and recombined. As she states in the notes to the translation project, “… the poem is a series of decisions made with all parts of the body and more….”
John’s French translator, Tristan Malavoy, mentions drawing on Québec speech styles to capture her “strong link to orality.” Throughout total, there is a feeling of the poet talking to herself, and in dialogue with implied others. Many of the poems, particularly those rendered in ALL CAPS, have the feel of social media posts, decontextualized text messages, or photo captions. Collectively they sketch out a negative space of unseen material. Some of these read as a tongue-in-cheek satire of online wellness culture. “IS GROW IMPROVE?” asks John, and later she tells us, “AND WHEN I TAKE MY OMEGA-3S I DON’T CRAVE CHEESE / NOW THAT I’M NOT ANXIOUS ALL THE TIME I CAN TELL WHEN I’M ANXIOUS”. She makes reference to fasting, to card reading, to dreams and to religion. She wants to know, “HEY WHAT DO YOU GUYS DO WITH YOUR THOUGHTS?”
The book is divided into sections whose titles are themselves brilliant little poems, from “WOLF / NEST / PEACE OF MEET” to “I DO FEEL SOMETHING BACK HERE. BUT IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE PAIN. IT FEELS LIKE KNOWLEDGE.” John’s stylistic choices in titling and layout prod us to consider the text as its own unique artifact, adjacent to but distinct from the (Eurocentric) poetic tradition. That’s not to say that she can’t do a poem that looks like a poem—there are several of these, and they are stunning. In particular, “TO HAVE THE DESIRE TO GET MILK AND TO GO AND GET, ACTUALLY, FROM THE STORE, MILK” is a stand-out piece that renders miraculous the quotidian. Here John narrates an ordinary moment in which, while working on a writing task, she interrupts her flow to go out to the store: “In New Balances, running down and then back up six flights / With milk ….” To buy milk requires money, and the money comes from the writing of “… an assignment, a “text,” for an / Exhibition, so as to get money, so as to give it back (that’s right / TD Visa) so as to negate what was made actual: a meal, an item / A cost, a purchase made mine by my word and will ….” And the poet’s will is powerful and magical, actualizing physical reality: “… So I will, okay, immediately, pop / Into the kitty-cornered grocery store—overpriced, expensive / Windowed, there—and with a wave of my bank card’s chip get / Milk.”
total, by Aisha Sasha John. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, March 2025. 120 pages. $18.95, paper.
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny (University of Alberta Press).
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 