Keeping everything in sight

Dual book launch

Patrick Friesen: Sightings

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

Eve Joseph: Dismantling

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● McNally Robinson Booksellers Grant Park

● Saturday, 7 p.m.

● Free

Writer finds meaning in everyday strangeness

Poet Eve Joseph has long written from the thresholds — where the literal and the mythic blur, where the living brush against the dead and where the natural world behaves with its own strange logic.

Her newest book, Dismantling (Anvil, 76 page, $20), dedicated “For Patrick, always,” extends that vision in a series of prose poems and centos.

Joseph lives in Victoria, B.C., with her husband, Steinbach-born poet-playwright-essayist Patrick Friesen. The two will launch their new books together on Saturday at McNally Robinson Booksellers — Joseph with Dismantling and Friesen with Sightings.

It’s a rare literary double bill: two major voices, two new works, one night.

For Joseph, the event carries particular meaning.

“Patrick and I are excited to be launching together in Winnipeg,” she says by email. “Over the 27 years we’ve been together, I’ve come to love the city. Every time we visit I’m struck by how alive the arts are and by the support and collaboration I feel amongst artists.”

She’s drawn to the Prairies’ “spoken and unspoken” history and has favourite haunts — Sunday nights at Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club with blues musician Big Dave McLean and dinners at Feast Bistro on Ellice Avenue.

“When we married, Big Dave played at our wedding in a cabin in the woods just outside of Victoria,” she says.

The joint launch is unusual.

“We don’t often have books come out the same year, so this is exciting for us,” she says.

And while Friesen has lived on the coast for decades, “Manitoba is still very much his home.”

Joseph’s career has been defined by her willingness to look directly at what others avoid.

Her non-fiction book In the Slender Margin, drawn from years working in hospice, won the Hubert Evans Award and remains one of Canada’s most intimate meditations on death.

Her Griffin Prize-winning collection Quarrels (2018) bent dream logic into something sharp and uncanny. Earlier books — The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things — revealed a writer attentive to the strangeness of the everyday.

Dismantling gathers those impulses into a single, concentrated work.

Across sections titled “inevitabilities,” “extinction,” “relationship” and “reflection,” Joseph creates a world where owls drop rats onto balconies, raccoons roll up new sod like pastry and an eagle swims before it flies.

These moments resist simple metaphor; the natural world becomes a companion and witness.

The emotional terrain is equally vivid.

A marriage ends through ferries cancelled by wind. A father builds an impossible basement boat. A mother’s lies become a kind of inheritance. The death of a beloved dog is rendered with quiet precision. Time behaves strangely: the moon drifts away from the earth at the rate fingernails grow; hands shine like polished wood.

Midway through the book, Joseph turns to centos — poems composed entirely from other poets’ lines.

“It has been such a pleasure, and privilege, to go back through the works of the poets who inspired me early on and to find new works by poets I hadn’t heard of,” she says.

Seeking permission from writers around the world led to “wonderful encounters and conversations … some of whom have become friends.”

What surprised her most was how these borrowed lines came together in something resembling her own voice.

At home, poetry is woven into daily life.

“Poetry is a common language in our house,” Joseph says.

Their approaches differ — Friesen’s musical and spoken aloud, Joseph’s spare and controlled — but those differences make the exchange easier. She often retreats to a friend’s cabin in Roberts Creek to write.

“I never need to explain this to Patrick — he fully understands,” she says.

Joseph returned to writing in her late 40s “after many detours.”

Early on, Friesen offered advice that stayed with her: go to the Sylvia Hotel with a bottle of whisky and write.

“It was the best writing advice I’ve ever received.”

— Martin Zelig