The Shining Material

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By (author): Aisha Sasha John

The Shining Material is about saying I. Disrupt, interrupt, challenge I? How boring. How violent. Better/instead/also cradle-interrogate I; to a steaming, exfoliating shining, hold I: the curve at the top of I, the curve at the base of I, the long shaft I oh I. Sigh: I, you get a lot of shit, so in The Shining Material, the poet speaks you meekly, hoarsely, disobediently: witness Aisha Sasha John braid self-portrature, ekphrasis, and her own brand of psalm to produce an experience much like falling down the stairs and it helping.

AUTHOR

Aisha Sasha John

Aisha Sasha John writes poetry and plays. Her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, Exile Quarterly, CV2, Carousel, and the Diaspora Dialogues anthology, TOK 3. In 2009, Aisha completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph; in 2010/11, she’s writing a play called Kissy Kissy as part of Nightwood Theatre’s Write From the Hip program as well as Theatre Passe Muraille’s theatre creators group, Upstarts.

Reviews

“Miss John here reminds, in oddly comely poems of direct address, “how small the aesthetic is” and how ravenously transcendent the human woman. The mouths of these poems adore phonemes and are unafraid of their important difference: they say the woman as the linguist of thinking. They refuse to assuage or to mollify or to rectify. They smack of an emergent candour. To serve their biopolitic, they may have invented an extra vowel, the first since Hittite.” ï¿½Lisa Robertson

“John’s eminently relatable, apparently literal anecdotes slip quite seamlessly into mythology and surrealism.” ï¿½Helen Guri