The poet and writer Eve Joseph discusses her new book In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying (Patrick Crean Editions, 2014), live in person with Joseph Planta.

In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying by Eve Joseph (Patrick Crean Editions, 2014). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: In the Slender Margin

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, at TheCommentary.ca.

My guest now begins her new book recounting the moments before and after her brother’s death in 1965. She was 12, and her older brother was killed in a car accident. From there begins such an elegantly written, reflective and intimate book. Relegated to the basement as the grownups upstairs dealt with grief, Eve Joseph has spent the course of this book, and I suspect much longer, looking back at death in ways unseen before. She goes to the frontline if you will, as she spends some twenty years in the hospice care field, seeing death up close. And has since looked to faith, spirituality, popular culture, philosophy, literature, mythology, and poetry to try and understand death a little bit better. We have the result of her journey in a tremendous book: In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying. It’s quite a moving book, because it looks at the mystery about death, something we’re loath to talk about, yet which we experience personally, what with people around us who die, and eventually ourselves. Eve Joseph joins me now, and I’ll get her to tell us about this book, what she found out, and where we go from here. There are a lot of moving anecdotes in this book, her own and those of others, that you do realise that there aren’t any coincidences in life. Eve Joseph is a noted writer and poet. Her work has been published in a multitude of journals and anthologies, and she’s been nominated for a number of prizes, including the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the PK Page Award. The website for more is at www.evejoseph.com. The book is published by Patrick Crean Editions, which is an imprint of HarperCollins. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Eve Joseph; Ms. Joseph, good morning.

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