Aisha Sabatini Sloan - Borealis

Praise for Borealis

An extraordinary experience! The place Borealis takes us to is lodged within a vivid consciousness. Here, the environment is populated by memories of lovers and strangers with guns. Letters from prison arrive in this place, and confinement haunts its wide margins. The soundtrack fades in and out, art is found and made. A landscape has never felt so real to me, so like life.

Eula Biss

As aurora to her titular borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan bends and flashes with belletristic dexterity and a quietly big-sticked insistence upon her own agency. I forget whats a thing to say, she writes, even as her unique geometries of syntax, set against the books glacial blocks of white space, elicit revelatory ways not just to say a thing but to see it. Through dexterous collaging of art, literature, correspondence, music, overheards, skylight colors, and intellectual flexes set against a prisons visiting-room wall, Borealis resists bindings of genre or collective propinquity. Instead, Sabatini Sloans conversational architectures of space illuminate landscape as an internal experience whose vastness, she finds, forces her to become her own friend.

Samiya Bashir

Praise for Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit

Winner of the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction The Rumpus, What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Pride

Though its hard to narrow down my choices in nonfiction, I can tell you that I put down Aisha Sabatini Sloans Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit and instantly wanted to pick it up again. The intelligence and expansiveness of this book of essays astounded me.

Camille Dungy

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit is an otherworldly meditation on the elasticity of memory, the liveliness of blackness, and possibilities of the essay. Aisha Sabatini Sloan manages to produce a collection of essays that are at once innovative, inspiring, sobering, and absolutely terrifying while daring every other essayist in the country to catch up.

Kiese Laymon

Im so impressed by the critical lucidity of Aisha Sabatini Sloans Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. Essay by essay, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes even sentence by sentence, Sloan roves, guided by a deliberate, intelligent, associative logic which feels somehow both loose and exact, at times exacting. The implicit and explicit argument of these essays is that theres no way out but through and maybe even no way out. So here we are, so lucky to have Sloan as our patient, wry, questing companion and guide.

Maggie Nelson

Dreaming, exploring, probing, confessing, Aisha Sabatini Sloan is always on the move. She crosses borders, turns fixed states of mind and heart into fresh sites of possibility and mystery. Those vast charged realitiesrace, class, gender, geographybecome particular here, casting light and shadow on each other in startling ways. This is a luminous book.

Margo Jefferson

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

SPATIAL SPECIES SERIES
Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, series editors

Copyright 2021 by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Foreword 2021 by Youmna Chlala

Cover art and design by Mika Albornoz

Book design by Mika Albornoz

Author photograph Hannah Ensor

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Sabatini Sloan, Aisha, author.

Title: Borealis / Aisha Sabatini Sloan.

Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021020992 (print) | LCCN 2021020993 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896191 (trade paperback) ISBN 9781566896283 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sabatini Sloan, Aisha. | Alaska. | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC PS3619.A265 B67 2021 (print) | LCC PS3619.A265 (ebook) | DDC 814/.6 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020992

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020993

Printed in the United States of America

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For Remy, a.k.a. Rio

Dear Aisha,

As I read Borealis, Homer, Alaska, became a constellation of relations finding their way toward each other over and over again. Your way of looking is curious and alert. It is defiant and humorous. It is also beautifully disorienting. As we try to locate ourselves, spaces shape-shift. We inhabit mountains, shorelines, tents, prisons, and cabins. It is as if you are trying to land your gaze somewhere, but the landscape wont let you.

You align your spatial movements with memory, art, and associations. Some exchanges are intimatewith your father, nephew, uncle, and wife. Some are distant, relationships that have brought you to Homer before. This time, it feels as if the landscape is your other. You revisit ocean, shore, rock, cloud, sky, moon, driftwood, glacier, and mountain. We encounter sea otters, seals, moose, dogs, birds, whales, and bears. These sites and beings become entangled in the connections. And there are many artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians who take part in the dispersed conversation. Among them, Renee Gladman, Paul Simon, Bjrk, Adrian Piper, John Keene, Fred Moten, Maxine Hong Kingston, Robin Coste Lewis, and Saidiya Hartman.

Lorna Simpsons Ice painting series is there throughout. Her glaciers and worlds appear and disappear. The paintings question representation, they offer speculation, and sometimes they even fail. You write: Im feeling territorial about glaciers today. The glacier is a real and imagined site of questions about the affects of place, seeing, and belonging. Because your seeing is multiple, it takes notice of beauty and terror. You write: Im working on this bright pile of a salad, quivering with angel hairthin beets, and Im eyeing the dock, unsure if the armed teen is off to shoot fucking wolf pups or what.

Being alone in Homer, Alaska, is also about the fears, violence, and realities of being a visible, raced, gendered, and queer body. You write: When there is no Black figure, what am I supposed to like looking at? What happens when there is no reflection in the landscape? Not even refraction? What do we look for to make sense of where we are? The spaces you look at are simultaneously open and closed.

We begin to hear your boredom. We move through isolation and repetition. You illuminate the many forms of confinement and their consequences. We feel your unexpected losses. Were convinced no one will remember youve been there before. And then the waitress recognizes you. How do we look and heal? You write: I figured I would never go to the chiropractor again because of the history of White supremacy and necks. And then you do.

I imagine you pulling apart the fragments of memory, image, and encounter as you create a new system of seeing. This happens when you describe one of your own collages: Fire-inflected circle, horizon line on the vertical. A woman with pink hair bending over. Our strangeness an attempt to smash back into the natural world