Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetics of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, "the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant." If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names they give themselves.

Shelter
The rubber plant in the hospital cafeteria is waiting for rain. Palms up beneath a sky of fluorescent lights, its leaves are broad enough to be roof, temporary shelter, shade to small creatures caught in the open. The hiker, for instance, who has made a fire with wet twigs and hunkers down to wait it out under his wide blue tarpaulin.

Eve Joseph's two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin, was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. The book was named one of the Top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail.

"Joseph's impulse to uncover the transcendent in the ordinary is an engaging one. Readers ... will find comfort and encouragement in these poems."--Rhea Tregebov, The Globe and Mail

"Joseph's poems present a kind of reflective exactnessÑwithout glare and blinding light that may dazzle and distract ... Joseph's collection is thus a portrait of the real, marked by gorgeous observation, and made naked through her delivery."--Alanna F. Bondar, The Goose