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.

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.

— from "Shelter"

EVE JOSEPH’s first book of poetry, The Startled Heart (2004), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. The Secret Signature of Things (2010) was also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, along with the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award. She was awarded the 2010 P.K. Page Founder’s Award for Poetry. Her non-fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, and her essay “Intimate Strangers” was nominated for a National Magazine Award and won both the Malahat Review’s Non-Fiction Award and the Western Magazine Awards “Gold” category for B.C. and Yukon Territories. Her work has been published in a number of Canadian and American journals and anthologies. Eve Joseph lives in Victoria, B.C.

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