Description:
In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of thirty-nine of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the profound impact of one of our five main senses: touch.
Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers, and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch or experience touch, or to have to go without it--as so many did and still do because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They explore how transmissions such as texting may impede opportunities for touch, while those like Zoom may make it possible for people who otherwise might be left behind to stay "in touch." From the experience of touching beloved animals to the life-changing ways in which books and performances can touch us, virtually all aspects of touch are acknowledged in these pages.Brief description:
ANNE-MARIE OOMEN is the author of The Lake Michigan Mermaid (coauthored with Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields, An American Map: Essays, Uncoded Woman, and Love, Sex, and 4-H. She has written seven plays, including the award-winning The Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern. She is a poetry and nonfiction instructor at Solstice MFA at Lasell University and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She and her husband, David Early, live in their handmade house near Traverse City, Michigan. Visit her at www.anne-marieoomen.com.
Review Quotes: The Art of Touch is a remarkable collection of essays and poems on the motivations, transformations, catastrophes, and beauty that lie in human touch. The authors, who are poets, novelists, psychotherapists, and scientists, provide a full range of contemplations on their personal experience of touch, ranging from the terror of physical touch to the most recent advances in the study of touch by a neuroscientist. The pandemic has forced upon us the issue of the dangers of being touched by anyone and of touching something anyone else might have touched. We all know the dehumanizing effects of this situation just as we know the joy and beauty of touch with those we love. The reader will find that he or she is deeply touched by this book.--Thomas H. Ogden, psychoanalyst "author of This Will Do"