Borealis

Summary: "In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes about a solitary summer visit to Alaska, observing glaciers, shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and herself. As she studies her surroundings, the myth of Alaska-excitement, exploration, possibility-is complicated by boredom and isolation, and her attempts to set down place in writing are suffused with nostalgia and anxiety. The first title commissioned for the Spatial Species series, Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Sabatini Sloan's experiences as a queer woman contemplating her Blackness 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, 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"--