hyperboreal

Blessedly, there are exceptions: Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, which recasts the Arctic as an inhabited region of ecological plenitude; or Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Hyperboreal, a lyrical investigation of loss and continuity on King Island, the author’s ancestral home, from which her family was forcibly removed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; or Mat Johnson’s satirical novel Pym, a wildly subversive investigation of the racial ideologies that shape polar storytelling.

You close each door, draw armchairs nigh the fire, But draughts sneak in and make you draw ’em nigher– No matter: still they come: play parlour gales And whisk about their hyperboreal tails; Bed’s the one hope, and scarcely tried before Next morning’s postman thunders at the door.

Our hyperboreal Palinurus was perfectly acquainted with this modern Charybdis, and used every stratagem of which he was master, to escape it; but the wind being light, left the cutter to the mercy of the current.