swim into the north’s blue eye explores the gothic anxieties and bodily discomforts of constant travel. Some of its journeys are global, but many are more regionally oriented: from one prairie city to another, between small towns, from city to cottage-country, from prairie to coast.

This collection also follows Lapointe’s family migrations around western Canada, particularly into fly-in communities of northern Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 70s. Those settlements, whose remoteness makes every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.

“These poems locate themselves in the salty past and tannic present, steeped in the stories of her parents and grandparents but also saturated with Lapointe’s own longing and loss. The reader swims open-mouthed despite themselves, tasting everything.”
— Ariel Gordon

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