Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays
Description
An electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constriction
This collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and celebrity sightings. In a voice that is at once piercing, mournful, and slyly comic, Aisha Sabatini Sloan inhabits several roles: she is an art enthusiast in Los Angeles during a city-wide manhunt; a daughter on a road trip with her father; a professor playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont; an interloper on a police ride-along in Detroit; a collector of the dreams of scientists at a biostation. As she watches cell phone video recordings of murder and is haunted in her sleep by the news, she reflects on her formative experiences with aesthetic and spiritual discovery, troubling those places where Blackness has been conflated with death.
Sabatini Sloan’s lively style is perfectly suited to the way she circles a subject or an idea before cinching it tight. The curiosity that guides each essay, focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic, is rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening.
Praise for Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays
“The incisive prose brims with astute observations, and Sloan has a talent for drawing meaning from unexpected juxtapositions. . . . Readers will be spellbound.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Sabatini Sloan] brings to her writing a lively curiosity . . . in pieces notable for surprising and revealing juxtapositions. An enlightening gallery of spirited essays.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Throughout each [essay], Sloan has a topic—a piece of art, a historical event—around which her mind and language whirls. . . . Remarkable.” —Diana Arterian, Literary Hub
“Sloan’s reflections are robust and poetic, her writing like lucid dreaming. I was rapt with this book.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“In Sabatini Sloan’s hands, the essay itself offers a wide aesthetic terrain to tread through such investigations. The form is akin to breathwork throughout these pages in that her prose provides a steadying, capacious rhythm. Her language is precise and exacting but never sterile, never off beat.”—Jessica Lynne, Electric Literature
“This collection as a whole forms an elegant, intricate tapestry. . . . It's a collage of experiences, research, quotations, anecdotes—personal revelations and scholarly observations that refuse to omit the violence and oppression that serves as our constant visible or invisible frame, or let it take up the frame entirely.” —Heather Bowlan, The Anarchist Review of Books
“Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit has never felt more relevant. . . . Sabatini Sloan's writing is spacious and straightforward, made up of concise, poetic sentences that leave plenty of room for the many questions and minimal answers she puts forward.” —Katja Vujic, The Cut
“The 13 essays in Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit deftly approach an array of topics, each building in collage-like fashion a revelatory, often startling reflection around a central subject or theme that pulls personal experience, research, and sharp observation into a vortex that ultimately holds together and gives us a way of seeing — if but for an instant — the shimmering complexity and interconnectedness of the world.”—Yelizaveta P. Renfro, Washington Independent Review of Books
