In Borealis, essayist Aisha Sabatini Sloan (Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit) unfurls a vivid patchwork of ruminations on her relationship to the town of Homer, Alaska. For the author, Homer is the nexus of a sprawl of memories and associations: the exes with whom she grew to know the place ("Alaskans were like my girlfriend, prepared for discomfort, easy to smile"), the tedium she endures there ("Because I cannot kill it, I traverse my boredom"), the acute awareness it brings to her Blackness ("We are at about bald eagle to seagull proportion to the Whites here"). Sabatini Sloan arranges her fragmented reflections as a collage, finding surprising resonances between disparate elements to produce a picture of a place that feels both expansive and personal.
Not content to rest her exploration of Homer on tropes of travel and nature writing, Sabatini Sloan expands her scope to consider an array of artists and writers. She pays special attention to the ways in which various media can augment the experience of a place: a Björk song, "symphonic and gusting," provides the score to an eagle sighting; a snippet of an Anne Carson essay recalls the moonlight in Fairbanks. Among the dizzying array of references, most illuminating are the frequent returns to photographer and painter Lorna Simpson and poet Robin Coste Lewis. As Sabatini Sloan contemplates their work, she brings shards of language, texture and color to bear on her own perceptions of the landscape and her place within it. In this way, Borealis offers an evocative meditation on subjectivity and place. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.