October 2024

Nashville, TN

In Response to Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Dear Lars:

It occurs to me that we never discussed specific parameters for this reading journal, but I feel drawn to a letter format, partially inspired by the letter-style foreword to Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis. 

That was, in fact, the first thing that struck me about the work. It’s something I can’t recall ever having seen before although it makes perfect sense. I suddenly feel like every foreword is in some way, a letter, (signed, dated, in conversation with the work, etc.) though I suppose they usually addresses the reader rather than the author. I like this new-to-me approach and feel like it’s something I may want to use in the future when writing introductions or blurbs—I’m often stuck with what/how to write and suspect the idea of framing it in my mind as a letter to the author could prove helpful.

One of the other things I noticed as I started to move through the work was a feeling that I was reading the structural mirror image of Jenny Bouley’s The Body: An Essay. There we had footnotes with no essay; here we have a highly referential essay with absolutely no explanatory footnotes. 

Reading Borealis, I felt equally unmoored, with…