In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

Poet and essayist Joseph (The Startled Heart) serves up luminous, poetic prose in this thoughtful look at dying, grief, burial, and how animals react to loss, among many related topics. The subtitle is apt, as she writes with defamiliarizing tenderness about an apparently familiar subject, asking, “Everything we love, we must leave. How is it we are not inconsolable?” As an antidote to our “death-denying culture,” the author considers many aspects of death, including the personal (the death of her much older brother when she was 11), the cultural (the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous Salish people cooking meals for their dead), and the linguistic (“The phrase six feet under originated in England in 1665”). The material is organized intuitively, not formally. Joseph moves freely from reflections on her brother’s death to social history leavened with bits of arcana, and then to insights gleaned from working with hospice patients. These include her observation that “the language of the dying is not static; it is a language of movement and motion, of platforms, tickets, passports and maps, visitations and greetings, entrances and exits.” Readers will discover an entire book full of such intuitive and satisfying musings.[em] Agent: Westwood Creative Artists. (Jan.) [/em]