*Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction
*Winner of the 2022 Jean Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction
In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom.
Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Coffee House Press Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.
Praise for Borealis:
“There’s a push and pull to the movement of [Sabatini Sloan’s] ideas that engaged me completely. Structurally, this beautifully fragmented essay creates space for the reader to sit with the thoughts and images which engage Sloan. . . . Rigorous essays shake up memory, history, and what we consider the knowledge we possess.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Observer
“Negotiating between the spaciousness of her environment and the strictures of history and identity, she frames travel as both fraught and illuminating.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Borealis is an absolutely beautiful meditation on the cohabitation of linguistics and space, specifically interrogating the confines of being perceived. Weaving art and experience together, Aisha Sabatini Sloan complicates landscapes—both the physical understanding of place and the more difficult-to-pin-down landscape of one’s lived experiences. With intimacy and care, Sloan writes her own lifetime of art-making and what we might learn from the art and landscapes of others. Borealis is a delight and a truly stunning work.”
—Kaitlynn Cassidy, Seminary Co-op Bookstores
“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