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.

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. It 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.

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. With acute sensibility, Wendy McGrath has harnessed the many touch sites proposed by the contributors and made this volume the ultimate tactile map, where multi-genre narratives expand and contract, sit in haptic dialogue next to each other, in the hopes of touching their audience with this collection’s beating heart.

“Beyond Touch Sites takes us on migrations both physical and imaginative. The journeys here transport and transform.”— Christine Wiesenthal, PhD. Professor Emeritus, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta