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.)