By Catherine Owen
Total
by Aisha Sasha John
McClelland and Stewart (2025)
Performative poetry, page-bound, retains its power, but also establishes a yearning.
As essentially a transcription, it makes the reader ache to press a button in the book – make a hologram appear of the spoken-word artist inhabiting their languages.
In Aisha Sasha John’s case, through her manifestations of dance. The core pieces in total , John’s fourth celebrated collection, are rendered in all-caps, the lines fragmented, slashed, set out of context, shimmering around a body in motion. In “BEGUILING” we move, for instance, from the image of a, “PROFESSIONAL EMBROIDERY MACHINE” to the aphoristic mystery of the statement, “THAT THE OPPOSITE OF ABANDON IS CHERISH.” Spinning through eight segments, all wildly titled with quotations such as Adam Phillips’ : “One’s personal history, whatever else it is, is a history of one’s obedience” or a comment seemingly detached from the subsequent poems but that echoes from a prior piece like “I am new to evenings,”” John explodes notions of TOTAL with an inclusivity comprised of anxiety, the Tarot, pasta, anger, toilet dreams, an X-men academy, Zoom meetings, love, black identities, arugula, nursery rhymes, Banksy, tears, and and and. . . Also a cat strutting by is messing shit up too: “THE CAT JUST CLIMBED ATOP ME” ; “THE CAT JUST UPCHUCKED AND RE-ATE HER/CHICKEN TREAT.”
Total is indeed encompassing, flowing from intimate headlines that blare in vertiginous hungers to poems that are softer incantations, as in the repetitions of “let loose” in the ferociously-titled, GIVE ME WHAT I WANT AND DO WHAT I SAY (YOU LITTLE BITCH)” or the prosy pieces that meld, as does Ashbery or Myles, the everyday surreal with the quotidian necessary: “And owled, as an owl or with them…I will, okay, immediately, pop/ into the kitty-cornered grocery store (there’s that cat again!)…and with a wave of my bank card’s chip get/milk” ( TO HAVE THE DESIRE TO GET MILK AND TO GO AND GET, ACTUALLY, FROM THE STORE, MILK).
Amid discombobulations, veerings and other lexical swerves, John whirls into lucid pronouncements: “Because nothing true is too much/and anything that isn’t true is/never enough” (YOU NEEDN’T WORRY ABOUT IT BEING TOO MUCH) or “HOW CAN I REMEMBER WHAT I WANT TO FORGET?” (WHAT’S THE WORK I NEED TO DO TO DO THE WORK I NEED TO DO?). Near the end of total , John exclaims, “I SPEAK WITH MY SPINE,” and we can read this both as an elaboration of bravery and as an expression of somatic intensity. The very bones must “risk singularity” (MISSING SOMETHING) in order to, more wholly, sing.
Catherine Owen is a Vancouver-born, Edmonton-based poet, prose writer, reviewer, editor, podcaster, and performer. She’s authored 17 collections, her most recent being Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books, 2024), long‑listed for the Al and Eurithe Purdy Prize. Owen hosts the 94th Street Trobairitz series, runs the Ms Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws podcast, and teaches communications.