Poetry. African American Studies. In THE SHINING MATERIAL, Aisha Sasha John is a hostess; welcome to her house. Inside there is a party, a prayer, a painting that puts its fingers in your mouth--let it: in THE SHINING MATERIAL witness Aisha Sasha John braid self-portraiture, ekphrasis, and her own brand of psalm to create a collection of poems that is a tonic: dizzying in its open-mouthed, symphonic charge. These poems stage intimate encounters as they work against the language of the banal. Dancing across, between and at the interstices of the self, no poem is a single statement: they all recognize language as a perpetual subject of inquiry. THE SHINING MATERIAL is an opportunity to trace a fresh sensibility that will continue and make the work of this young innovative woman writer a powerful force in avant-garde writing around the world.

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 candor. To serve their biopolitic, they may have invented an extra vowel, the first since Hittite.--Lisa Robertson

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Book*hug
Published: 05/31/2011
ISBN: 9781897388792
Pages: 62