TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (excerpt)

Aisha Sasha John

To have the desire to get milk and to go and get actually milk, from the store, in New Balances, running down and then back up six flights, with milk, and to finish the Elenbaas talk about dharma and the ascendant, and to focus on this question of fountains, so as to begin something, and also continue, so as to have adequate days to amend, ameliorate, improve, polish, better that which I've begun, writing, that is, a piece—about fountains, so as to complete 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, a purchase, a cost, an item, made mine, by my word and will, with the absented head/away daze of being here, busy and idle, purposed and lost, tasked and unmoored, and, now, owled, as an owl, or with them or one or as yes as one, hunting in the night and resting too. I had a dream about a group of people and one of them, this man, something happened to him. I remembered it so well this morning I imagined never being able to forget. So I will, okay, immediately, stop at the round-the-corner grocery store—overpriced, expensive, windowed, there—and purchase with a wave of my bank card's chip, milk.

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Aisha Sasha John‘s medium is energy. A poet and choreographer, Aisha is the author of I have to live. (McClelland & Stewart), finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, THOU (Book*hug), finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, and TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (UDP). Aisha was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) in 2018 and served as guest faculty for the 2019 Writing Studio residency program at The Banff Centre. Aisha is also the 2019-2022 Dancemakers’ Resident Artist—in 2021 she will commence research on an ensemble work DIANA ROSS DREAM. Her solo work the aisha of is premiered at the Whitney Museum in 2017.

cover of To Stand at the Precipice Alone and Repeat What Is Whispered

Brooklyn, New York

"With masterful clarity, Aisha Sasha John transforms that archetypal tale of “the return home” into a capsule of sensations that is so contemporary and alive. I loved this book."
—Sheila Heti

"Climb Aisha Sasha John's cliff and meet her energetic catalogue of daily life in the ruins of a disquieting world. John's cliff is language for recovering the ecstatic from the heights and depths of collapse. When a poet finds levity in the deadweight of hard revelations, with her signature wit and her eye scanning every direction from the summit, you go wherever she whispers toward."
—Canisia Lubrin

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