Beyond Touch Sites
an Anthology of the Tangible
From the moment we leave the warm seas of our mothers’ bellies to join the world of Alone, tactility defines the contours of our being. With smell, touch is the oldest of our senses. It is also, as the explorations in Beyond Touch Sites reveal, one of the most complex and intimate conduits of human experience and communication. All-enveloping as our skin, our haptic sense can localize, lightning-quick, to specific memory sites. Touch can heal and harm, comfort and confront, catalyzing the other senses and carrying us to distant places. Touch moves us. We are touched.
The modalities of touch addressed by the authors in this collection range across a spectrum of forms of contact: reparative, violent, retributive, gustatory, familial, ritual and ceremonial. Touch is a temporal event that unfolds in unexpected and often gripping ways in the stories, poems, essays and hybrid experimental and performative scripts collected here.
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