About the Book

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.

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.

Editor Bio

Wendy McGrath, a Métis poet, writer, and artist living in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), is the winner of the inaugural Prairie Grindstone Prize. McGrath’s writing embraces multiple genres. Her most recent publication, The Orange Scribbler (Jack Pine 2023), is a chapbook/artist’s book inspired by heirloom recipes. She has collaborated with visual artists and musicians, exploring the relationships between genres. Her latest collaboration, The Beauty of Vultures (forthcoming NeWest Press 2025), is a poetry collection inspired by and including the bird/wildlife photography of Danny Miles, drummer for the band July Talk.

McGrath has published four novels, two poetry collections, and two chapbooks/artist’s books which explore a range of forms and approaches. Broke City, the final book in her Santa Rosa Trilogy, continues her exploration of the prairie gothic. She is a board member of NeWest Press.

“In measuring the invisible radium of touch, the authors gathered in this collection integrate the work of translation and cultural crossings, enriching our understanding of corporeal experience with new layers and nuance. 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.

“Editing Beyond Touch Sites: An Anthology of the Tangible was an experience that allowed me to inhabit the liminal space between genre, time, place, and life and death.”

— Wendy McGrath From the Editor’s Introduction