“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
2023-10-13
Perceptive observations on American culture.
Sloan, author of The Fluency of Light, gathers 13 essays, written from 2016 to 2020, that range from meditations on the arts to incisive reflections on race. She brings to her writing a lively curiosity and multifaceted identity: She is biracial (Black father, white mother); queer, married, and undergoing in vitro fertilization; an academic who teaches literature and creative writing; and an artist well versed in the work of contemporary painters, such as David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whom figure in her essays, often in unexpected ways. Place figures importantly, too: Sloan grew up in Los Angeles, two blocks from where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. The neighborhood, she remembers, “acted toward my father and me as though we wandered into the place by accident.” L.A. is also the setting for an essay connecting the beating of Rodney King, and the riots that ensued, with Hockney’s paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sloan chronicles her visit to Detroit, where her parents moved, and which they portrayed as “a city more laced with wonder than desolation” and “the birthplace of gallerists and world-famous choreographers and raucous family dinners.” Despite the chaos and poverty Sloan observed, she loves the city for its “sense of possibility and kindness,” a love not diminished when she went on a tense ride-along with her cousin, a police officer. A trip to New England with students uncovered evidence of slavery, including at Harvard, where a portrait of donors to the college bears “a placard that says, in essence, ‘We got what we have because we stole and we raped and we murdered.’ ” Police brutality, lucid dreaming, the poetry of Galway Kinnell, and Basquiat’s obsession with the book Gray’s Anatomy all cohere in pieces notable for surprising and revealing juxtapositions.
An enlightening gallery of spirited essays.
