Access Instantly In The Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness Of Dying Composed By Eve Joseph Provided As Paper Edition

thoughtprovoking and wellwritten. No "answers," if that is what you're looking for in a book about death and dying, Instead, lovingly intimate truths that are often difficult, clearly reflected upon, . . a beautiful book. An excellent poetic memoir that rambles and meanders and yet never wanders off a serene and scenic path.
The path follows the reader, like a shadow, and the experience is entirely soulful,

Beautifully done. Excellent, contemplative, resonant. The language is poetic and lyrical, and imparts a feeling of intimacy and spaciousness, This is a book I always recommend for those on an uncertain journey into strangeness, A journey into the land of death and dying seen through the lens of art and the imagination

Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, In the Slender Margin is an exploration of death from an “insiders” point of view.
Using the threads of her brothers early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and to illuminate her travels through the land of the dying.
The book is neither an academic text nor a selfhelp manual rather, it is a rumination on death, dying and the mystery that awaits us all.


Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a buildup of thematic resonances.
In the process of thinking deeply about death, Joseph finds the brother she lost as a young girl.
She wrote this book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrendous.


Replete with literary allusions and references ranging from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D.
H. Lawrence and Voltaire, among many other literary voices, the result is an absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with death.
By far one of the best death books I've read so far, Out of dozens Poetic and thoughtful without being prescriptive, In the Slender Margin is a kind of freeassociation memoir about

the author's experiences as a hospice worker and her thoughts on how the living and the dying experience death.
Interspersed throughout the book are quotes from poets and artists, stories about how other cultures have viewed and dealt with death, and interviews with those who deal with the bodies of the dead.
If she raises more questions than she answers, this is only to be expected when writing of the mysterious topic of death.
A beautifully written book with an insightful perspective on death based on the authors life experiences, including those with personal loss, palliative care, and hospices, as well as her background as a poet.
This book is “all over the place” in a helpful way, bringing in quotations from a variety of cultures, contemporary writers, classical myth, religion, and art.
Beautiful writing. This subject matter was right on time, . . The amount of research that went into this book blew my mind, Joseph has taken the topic of death and explored it from what feels like every possible angle: “history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture” Amazon.
Reflecting on her experiences as a hospice care worker and the death of her brother when she was a young girl throughout, she examines the question of what happens to us when we die, how those left behind in various cultures navigate the transition, and why the language of poetry is akin to the language of death.
Personal, powerful, and evocative. A lovely book of her experiences with death in her family and then as a hospice worker for several years.
She quotes many others. One I marked was 'Music began with a howl lamenting a loss, The howl became a prayer and from the hope in the prayer started music, which can never forget its origin.
In it, hope and loss are a pair' British artist and writer John Berger, This book has been on my list since I read And the Birds Rained Down a few years ago, and it just finally got to the top of my list.
This was a super interesting book, Eve Joseph compares how different cultures deal with death and dying, especially the Coast Salish, which was really unique.
Another interesting technique that is used is etymology, Eve will review the etymology of a word relating to death and dying and by doing so makes the reader see the word, and the process, in a whole new light.
The memoir aspect of this book is limited, but I didn't mind that, Joseph perfectly connects her experiences with the death of her brother, mother, and many patients into a frame, within which she weaves the anthropology, language, culture, and practices of death.
This book was beautiful and fascinating and is definitely one I'd read again, A tender, informative examination of death and dying, Eve Joseph brings to the topic the practical knowledge of heryears as a palliative social worker as well as the brilliant insight of a poet.
Loved it. so this is a book by a poet about her work with hospice patients and, therefore, death.
I am a poet, I have been attracted to work with the dying or dead though I haven't actually done any and so I thought, yeah, cool, right up my alley.


actually, I found it annoying, I guess I was expecting just a lot of cool stories and anecdotes, and there are some.
there were some informative bits, like it takesmonths average for an unembalmed body straight in the earth to decay to bones.
but mostly she seemed to have little to actually say, her much older brother died when she wasand she realized decades later that her death work was a way to come to terms with that.
that's about her only solid realization, to be honest, the rest of it is a bunch of poetic sounding questions, which, yes, I know, I know, life is often more questions than answers.
but why write a book then just write poems, or a novel, or, write a book, but not this book, a book with more structure, I mean, she did some interesting things she ended up married for a while to a hereditary chief of the salish, a northwest coast tribe, and at one point does this ritual where you cook for the dead and then burn the food a ritual her mother had a strong reaction to.
I think I would have enjoyed the book more had the bones of it not been submerged that ceremony doesn't seem to have more weight than any other anecdote she tells about strangers.
let's hear more about your salish mother in law who thinks you trail a string of ghosts behind you and who recommends cleansing rituals to you.
let's be more forthcoming about the weight of your brother's death in your life, not much of a personal death, because she didn't know him that well, but certainly one with a huge impact on her family.
let's parallel that whole story more explicitly with the stories from hospice, instead of stirring it all together under chapters that just blur into each other, each seeming to be the same blend of personal musing, anecdotes, and random facts.


and I do mean random facts, not just about death. random, and distracting, facts. "Unlike lion tamer Claude Beatty, who tamed his cats with a chair and a whip, we use our intellect to try to bargain with death, thinking we can make a deal, forgetting there is a wildness at the heart of it.
" I find this sentence incredibly annoying, first of all, there is no need to name a lion tamer, if you've seen a cartoon with lion taming in it, you've seen whips and chairs, it's the stereotype. but more than that, why is the lion tamer bit in there AT ALL to contrast with intellect "rather than use a chair and a whip, we use our minds to bargain with death".
huh also, is it really the intellect that tries to bargain with forces we can't control wouldn't the intellect be the part of us that knows that is no use and it's not useless because death has a wildness at the heart of it.
it's not that we make a bargain with death, and death agrees, but then reneges because, darn it, it's just so wild.
it's useless because death is an impersonal force that you can't communicate with, I think she should have stuck to poetry you can get away with this kind of thing there, sticking lion tamers in where they don't belong.
even then, it would have been better if the poem talks about trying to tame death with a whip and a chair, then trying to strike a bargain after the chair is splintered and the whip cannot sting death ha even as the claws descend.
so this poetry doesn't make a good sentence and this sentence doesn't make good poetry,

or this nonsense: "Eight year old Spencer Wyatt, of Dacula, Georgia, was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was three.
His assistance dog, Lucia, stays with him day and night and summons help if he's having a seizure.
We fight death with everything in our arsenal when machines fail us, we call out the pack.
" this was from a section where she was apparently thinking dogs and death, what are the connections I can brainstorm again, completely distracting fact where she introduces this character, name, town, dog's name, age of diagnosis, all that, as if he's going to figure.
nope. that one sentence is all you ever hear of him and why the hell are we hearing of him specifically does she know his mom is this just a shout out did she do a kickstarter for this book with a reward of getting your kid's name mentioned because this doesn't have anything to do with death anyway.
this is about a seizure dog, that kid is not unique in having one, then, the vague assertion. "when machines fail us, we call out the pack", what on earth does that mean literally, it makes no sense, "well, I'm sorry charles, but we're not able to keep you alive with this respirator anymore, we're bringing in a group of dogs, " does it mean we turn to our community ugh,

a bit later on from these two quotes, she writes at the start of a paragraph, out of nowhere, "Why is it that trivia catches my attention Da Vinci believed that the heart was of such density that fire could not destroy it.
" ok, that question that is not a question for your readers, we'll take the answer, if you have one, but we don't know you, we don't know why trivia catches your attention.
we've seen you reporting it in complete non sequiturs, certainly,

I read a bit of a review that remarked that the book was a "freeassociation meditation", and that captures it perfectly.
that's not really something I want to read, however, most of the reviewers seem to love it, not me. I read this for the second time following the death of my mum, It made me feel better, I was sadly disappointed in this book, A strange mix of reflection on her work in palliative care, coming to terms with her brother's death, and literarycultural conjecture on death, left me dissatisfied about halfway through all the way to the end.
Death is a place of ambiguity, but Joseph leaves the reader without means of finding meaning in death beyond the subjective experience.
Easy read. Did not make my head hurt but the writing provoked some thought on death and dying, Not my genre of choice as I read it as a part of book group, Author focuses and comes back to the unexpected early death of her brother, weaving his life details throughout the book.
Running parallel to that story is the author's experiences as a social worker in the area of palliative care.
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