Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit Essays

For this penetrating collection, Sloan (Captioning the Archives), a creative writing professor at the University of Michigan, brings together reflections about art, race, and teaching. In "A Clear Presence," Sloan uses swimming pools as a motif to explore racial inequality in Los Angeles, contrasting David Hockney's paintings of affluent homes and their pools with the poverty Rodney King endured before drowning in a pool in 2012. Other entries reflect on Sloan's teaching experiences, including the time she led a literary program on a hike from near New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee to the Vermont home of poet Galway Kinnell. The incisive prose brims with astute observations, and Sloan has a talent for drawing meaning from unexpected juxtapositions, as in "D Is for the Dance Hours," which compares a ride-along with her cousin, a precinct lieutenant in Detroit, to the drama and conventions of operas ("The stories that my cousin told me before the ride-along could have come straight out of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera: Castrato. A woman protecting herself against the swinging arms of her brother picks up a knife and raises it toward him blindly.... When the heavy corpse is lifted for removal, the man's scrotum remains, sliced clean off his body"). Readers will be spellbound. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.