Annette Lapointe’s poetry collection 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.
The 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, which make every trip monumental, provide a frame for years of restlessness and desire, and for meditations on the still world and its swarming occupants.
Annette Lapointe (she/her) lived in rural Saskatchewan, Quebec City, St John’s, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and South Korea before settling in northern Alberta. She now lives in Treaty 8 territory, on the traditional lands of the Beaver people, and teaches English and creative writing at Northwestern Polytechnic.
Her first novel, Stolen (2006), was nominated for a Giller Prize and was the Winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards (First Book Award and Saskatoon Book Award). A Finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as being cited as a Globe & Mail Top 5 First Fiction choice, Stolen also garnered Lapointe a Canadian Authors Association-BookTV Emerging Writer award. She is the author of two other acclaimed novels (Whitetail Shooting Gallery — finalist for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year — and . . . And This is the Cure), and a collection of short stories, You Are Not Needed Now. swim: into the north’s blue eye is her debut poetry collection.
