Coffee House Press is pleased to introduce the Spatial Species series, our latest literary project, debuting in Fall 2021. Inspired by Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, our Spatial Species titles will be published as short, pocked-sized editions, each one keenly focused on place—the kind of place that becomes entangled with who we are and the way we experience the world around us—and how we might observe, explore, and reenvision a place through language as well as space.
The Spatial Species series is set to launch in our Fall 2021 season, beginning with a book by Aisha Sabatini Sloan (Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit).
Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis is an essay in which the author writes through the experience of being black and alone in Homer, Alaska, looking at glaciers real and imagined (is the glacier old love? other lives?). As the author considers Lorna Simpson’s arctic-inspired paintings, points of tangency arise between these artworks and the discourse about black bodies on the run, in hiding, free, and incarcerated.
From the series editors:
The Spatial Species series investigates the ways that we activate space through language. How do we mark and name our behavior in space? How do we observe a space? How does a space occur as a midpoint between memory and future Speculations?
The books are short mobile pamphlets about an activated self’s engagement with spaces. This is not spying. This is active, a tour, a quickening. This is leisurely, like eating, drinking, dreaming.
The writing engages unmarked spaces: not monuments or public squares, but non-spaces, strange alleys, serendipitous spaces one discovers only upon détournment, unbranded sites, spaces that deterritorialize, deform, and dispute the spaces around them. These are also everyday spaces, spaces in flux, spaces that are constantly being Reinvented.
In his works, Georges Perec suggested that the infra-ordinaire is not inferior; An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris privileges our relationships with spaces, especially ones we tend toward over and over again. He named what you could count on by naming what you could count. Perec found ways to measure with language (distance, time, objects, sites, memories, etc.), but the value being measured was something more intimate. We hope to continue this open and intimate conversation.
About the Author:
Aisha Sabatini Sloan's writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She is the author of The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, which was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, nominated for the Krause Prize, and winner of CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Nonfiction. She recently joined the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan as a visiting professor of creative nonfiction.
About the editors:
Youmna Chlala is a writer and artist born in Beirut and based in New York. Her poetry collection, The Paper Camera, will be published by Litmus Press in 2019. She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Prize and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in publications such as BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, and Bahithat: Lebanese Association of Women Researchers. She has exhibited widely including at the Hayward Gallery, the Drawing Center, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Art in General, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Art Dubai, and Hessel Museum of Art. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, the 2017 LIAF Biennial, and the Performa 11 Biennial. She is a professor in the Humanities and Media Studies and Writing Departments at the Pratt Institute.Ken Chen is the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. He served as the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008–2019. An NEA, NYFA, and Bread Loaf fellow, Chen co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. His essay “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show” became a key text in contemporary conversations about race and literature and has been cited in the New Republic, the New Yorker, LARB, Jacket, and the New York Times. He currently serves as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where he is writing about his attempts to rescue his father from the underworld, a site that serves as an archive for all that has been destroyed by colonialism.