I Have to Live ─ Poems

A new collection ablaze with urgency and radiant inquiry from a 2015 finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry


I have to live exists in the conceptual overlap between the "I" that is not confessional but turned out to the world and the desire for a "living privacy" that refuses the violence of the look. This is a poetry that enacts emotional intelligence; it employs the body and the sensory as modes of inquiry--because they are. In this way, in an unequivocal, decolonizing gesture, the "I" of these poems re-sees what it's been trained to un-see. The speaker of these poems is her own scientist, her own forensic authority, because the information she's been handed cannot be trusted. The result is pained, just, and ecstatic.

AISHA SASHA JOHN is a poet and dancer. She is the author of THOU (BookThug, 2014), a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Prize, and The Shining Material (BookThug, 2011). Aisha is also a member of the performance collective WIVES, whose show FEELED premiered at the 2016 OFFTA in Montreal, earning them the 2016 Audacity Prize. In 2017, WIVES' ACTION MOVIE will debut at La Chappelle Scenes Contemporaines in Montreal. Aisha has performed in Hamilton, Kelowna, Marrakech, Montreal, New York, Oakland, Ottawa, San Francisco, and Vancouver. She lives in Toronto. The author lives in Toronto, ON.