TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED

Aisha Sasha John’s TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED is a psychologically astute collection about what is embedded in our gait and cadences. In one poem, a friend describes the poet’s “nonstop movement” and “spontaneous clowning” as disarming to others, but the poet slowly understands that this gregariousness is a disguised “avoidant energy.” She wonders, aloud to the reader, if a performative garrulousness could be better dealt with “in quiet, in repose, in rest.” 

Such is the structure of the book, which is set in Vancouver and made up largely of run-on sentence prose poems that enact the speed of John’s brilliant self-interrogatory observational energy. If this poet were your friend, she'd read you without hesitation, and perhaps this is what is so addictive about the epiphanies of the book: the honesty is at once dry and attentive. For example, in casually trying to assess a “rogue symptom of a UTI,” the speaker puts her hand on her kidneys and states: “I do feel something back here. But it doesn’t feel like pain. It feels like knowledge.” In the same poem, the speaker describes seeing her father after 14 years, stating that “In 2004 when I was last there, this photo framed the kitchen. Now it hangs in his bedroom. He looks at it every day, apparently.” John’s casual “matter-of-factness” gets elevated, with ease, into the matter of poetry. 

Lastly, the poet does what writers of color should be allowed to do, which is to describe their vulnerability without white and normative voyeurism. “TO BE UNPITIABLE” as the poet says, and later, “TO BE RECOGNIZED AS TOTAL.” After all, the speaker explains, “even though I was bone I was not a relic,” meaning not a statistic, not an archive, not something to be studied, but still very much alive and human. The chapbook is a mere 25 pages, but John’s voice could carry a whole collection and maybe in some future, adapted into a more filmic medium or series.