Borealis

An intimate study of Alaskan glaciers, memory, loneliness, and Black embodiment in wild spaces.

In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan documents a solitary summer spent writing in Homer, Alaska. Memories of past stays with then-girlfriends accompany her as she revisits local shops and walks along beaches, observing glaciers while listening to Bjork. As she wanders, she sifts through ideas about identity, boredom, and nostalgia, setting her own process in dialogue with with a host of muses, including Lorna Simpson, Jean Toomer, Fred Moten, Anne Carson, arctic explorer Matthew Henson, and her own incarcerated nephew, who sends her essays from solitary confinement. Moving freely through the landscape of her mind, she writes in vivid bursts that mirror the bright collages of her own artistic practice. The first title commissioned for the Spatial Species series, Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Sabatini Sloan's experiences as a queer Black woman in the wilderness and in the mysteries of art-making.

The Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, 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, enigmatic spaces, edges and diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.