When I begin my interview with Aisha Sasha John with an inquiry — “where are readers encountering you in your journey as a poet?” — she seems a bit caught off guard. My question unwittingly exerts a pressure that she’s received throughout her career — a pressure to fit into a single, neat artistic category despite being a prolific performer, choreographer and poet.
On the other end of our phone call, John is at home decompressing. The Pool, a performance promoted as “a work about the power, patterns, and poetry of being together” has come to a close only days earlier. John choreographed The Pool in her capacity as Affiliate Artist at Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT).
“You’re catching me at the end of a four-day run, four night run, seven week project. So I’m just resting after that very intense, very consuming thing,” she says.
For two years, John has served as the inaugural Affiliate Artist at TDT, a salaried position that has enabled her to focus on dance choreography and performance. John finished her contract with TDT at the end of March, literally days before the launch of her poetry collection, total, on April 1.
“I haven’t done a lot of readings in the past few years because I haven’t really wanted to. But also nobody asked me, or people stopped asking me — which is fine. My writing and my poetry life has been a private thing.”
Our conversation marks the first time that John is turning her attention to the public-facing side of her book, total, a book that took seven-and-a-half years to produce.
John’s two previous books took three years to write.
Her acclaim as a poet is irrefutable. John’s collection THOU (Book*hug 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award and I have to live (McClelland & Stewart 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her chapbook TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (UDP, 2021) is now in its second edition.
Despite these accolades, John has never felt entirely at home within the world of Canadian poetry, a scene with a reputation for being very white, stodgy and, John notes, disembodied.
Many poets take for granted and even lean into the idea of the poet as a floating head. But John, a movement artist with a background in African dance working now in contemporary dance, resists against the idea of the untethered and disembodied artist.
Her dance career started later than that of her peers and her dance history is quite different, she says. This is perhaps why despite her many accolades in both dance and poetry, John does not identify as a dancer who writes poetry or a poet who dances, but rather a choreographer and dancer and performer and poet.
Reflecting on her last book, Griffin Prize finalist I have to live, John says she felt a certain internalized pressure to be legible and to resolve the title of the book. “It was like, ‘I have to live’ but I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t really know what it means. I was very concerned with legibility even though I pretended not to be.”
With total, John has more closely followed her excitement and curiosity, better trusting her heart and ears along their many explorations. Readers encounter a version of John who has become much more self-assured as a result of spending more time in her dance practice.
“I would just say total has way more self-trust. And I hope that any next book I make will just be stinkier with self-trust.”
After reading total twice and spending nearly an hour on the phone with John, I’m struck by the intensely associative nature of her ideas and mind. Her responses, like her poems, expand and wander, eventually circling back before landing gracefully. They exert a kind of gravitational energy, drawing on a wide array of ideas, experiences, moments and philosophies.
Across this collection, John draws from the Tarot, the Bible, a New York Times article about Matthew McConaughey, Gabor Maté, Rick Ross and more. Several of the poems are collages, gracefully striding between the divine and the quotidian. They not only reflect resistance to partition on an individual level but also intellectual, cultural, and global resistance to partition, legibility, coherence.
John shows us that hard edges that we’ve attempted to draw between and within language are artificial.
THE TETRALEMMA
— from SOTERIOLOGY, in total
LOST UNWANTED COMMUNITY
HALF A KITKAT AND A SLIMY CHICKEN SALAD SAMMY
THE PERCENTAGE OF WHAT I WANT TO COMMUNICATE THAT CAN ONLY BE PERFORMED
As we conclude, John says of total, “I let a lot more mystery in. And I might even say that it’s like the material of total is mystery. It’s like mostly mystery, capital M mystery.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“That’s exactly the thing. It feels right though,” she says.
There’s a brief silence on the phone, and then we both chuckle. It’s true. She’s right.
total: poems by Aisha Sasha John is out now.
This article appeared in the 2025 April/May issue.
