This paper explores the choice of a child’s focalization or narration in some of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and short stories to show that they are closely linked to the questions of uprootedness and loss that are inscribed in those writings. This analysis thus proposes to investigate how defamiliarization and various skirting processes are at work in such choices, and what possibilities they offer in terms of creation; how they enable alterity to be reached and tamed, and what is elusive to be retrieved and recaptured in representation.