the only music that makes sense in alaska
Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan is 5 x 6.75 x 0.35 inches & 144 pages.
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One of the most ecstatic experiences of my life (hiking alone in Glacier) is a very edited memory. I excise the fact that I was positively blaring Linda Ronstadt the whole time from my janky phone speakers, because I was alone and I didn’t want to surprise a bear or a moose or a man. But I fill in sounds like rushing river and the cracking melt of glaciers in my memory. Of course, I can’t really.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s essayistic Borealis, about her summers in Alaska, is way more honest than I am. The book is in love with nature, but it doesn’t bring any false stupid purity into it. She’d never excise the soundtrack. Sloan writes about glacier worship and missing the mark. She notes the impossibility of feeling graceful in a windbreaker and the pesky interruption of animal needs. A lot of the book is about tripping in the face of grandeur:
Borealis tracks Sloan’s time in Homer, an Alaskan seaside town, where she lived for two summers with two different girlfriends. She goes to house parties, lives in a cabin without running water, works at a bookstore, drinks with a girl gang of lesbians (all “dressed like geology majors”). She listens to Bjork and Chance the Rapper, the only people who make music that “brings the landscape into a kind of alignment with my nervous system.” When she’s invited to houses with indoor plumbing, she sneaks off to the bathroom to take showers. She describes Alaskans as “prepared for discomfort, easy to smile.”
Reading Borealis, I became suspicious of other nature writing, which compartmentalizes itself from everything not nature. That writing infected my nature memories, because in those essays, the narrator goes on the hike in Glacier and leaves out the Linda Ronstadt. This slim trim book is good enough to bring it all in.
Borealis was also this month’s installment of Purse Book Gals-On-The-Go Official Book Club Book. Here’s what a few Gals on the Go thought:
“A gorgeous book about glacier worship and power of nature, that’s also not self-serious. Rare!” - Christina
“This is very good reading for anyone also watching True D Night Country!! But the writer seems much more reasonable and only seems to spend summers in Alaska. But the drama of the landscape is very powerful. A little cruel to read a book about endless summer right now though.” - Em W.
“Another Bjork fan!” - Mac
+ a handful of gals (INCLUDING ME, the TOP GAL) also highly recommend Aisha’s 2017 Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit essays.
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