By Eve Joseph
In Eve Joseph’s latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious. In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legally people, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes the act of taking something apart and building again from scratch allows a poem to find its true form. Dismantling contains new works of prose poetry, along with a series of centos – poems built entirely on the lines of other poets. Old voices engage with new ones. Tomas Tranströmer and Ocean Vuong speak about a great unsolved love while Audre Lorde walks with Ahmad Almallah and César Vallejo as the grass bends, then learns to stand again. Joseph’s poems are about language; how lonely it is until time enters the poem and places it where it is meant to be.
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.
