By Eve Joseph
Originally published in 2014, In the Slender Margin was enthusiastically received and applauded for its respectful sensitivity in dealing with a subject that is still, to many, an avoidable topic of conversation: death and dying. Using her 20+ years’ experience working as a palliative care counsellor in a hospice as a springboard for exploration, Joseph probes our collective knowledge of that final life experience that we all must face.
Intimately personal and wise, this award-winning poet gives us a deep and profound musing, a “wise and lyrical meditation” on the slender margin, that mysterious slip of geography between life and death.
“In the Slender Margin is intended as an exploration rather than a balm or solace, though it will no doubt be those things for some people. Its resonance comes, rather, from its intelligent open-endedness, its unflinching, simultaneous embrace of death’s reality and persistent mystery.”
— Globe and Mail
“A literate, free-association meditation on the final fact of life.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Intricate and beautiful . . . Provides an intimate language for grief and makes death a site of wonder as much as pain. . . . In her careful prose, her encounters with the dead, dying, and mourning take on a kind of grace.” — National Post
Eve Joseph lives and works on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. She was awarded the P.K. Page Founder’s Award for poetry in 2010. Her nonfiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and won in the “Gold” category of the Western Magazine Awards. The first edition of In the Slender Margin, published by HarperCollins in 2014, won the Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize and was named one of the Top 100 Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail. Her most recent book of poetry Quarrels (Anvil, 2018) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize, The ReLit Award, and won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
