Edited by Wendy McGrath
LABERINTO PRESS
2025/$25.00/114 pp.
Albertans may be known for our touchiness, at least politically, but we haven’t generally been known for our sensitivity—which is to say Albertans are not particularly known for leaning into the sense of touch, or what is touching, either literally or figuratively. In Beyond Touch Sites, recently released by Laberinto Press, Edmonton poet and novelist Wendy McGrath complicates that narrative by collecting poems, stories, essays and other short pieces by Canadian writers from a variety of backgrounds addressing the importance of what is probably our most important sense.
I don’t envy McGrath the job of arranging the anthology. The variety of genres and approaches means any final arrangement is bound to miss at least one connection between pieces. But her choice to divide the anthology into “Tender,” “Trace” and “Time” works well, letting very different writers come together in the literary equivalent of chamber music.
“Tender” is the category that makes the most immediate sense when we’re talking about touch, and this part of the book address tenderness in all its forms—the tenderness of lovers, of parents, of friends and longing for love. All the writers in this section are immigrants to Canada, and the sense that exists only in memory or desire is strong here, as in Jumoke Verissimo’s poem “Touching Laughter (for Vivian)”: “My friend’s laughter arrived from the other side of the ocean./ I could touch it. I felt her rippling cheeks in my hands.”
The longing for absent touch is something we all have—even if we have never left our home. We long for the past, for instance, and feel it still with us. “Trace,” the most multilingual of the sections, brings together pieces that explore the touch of the past and how it lingers—in our person and in our communities. This section includes a short play by Edmonton’s Pierrette Requier, largely in French, about the traces of touch left by the members of a Franco-Albertan community, and an exquisite multiform longer poem, “Touch in Ten Movements,” by Calgary’s Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike.
Touch is a physical experience but it’s also a method of timekeeping (we count out the passing moments with our fingers on our wrists), of stopping time (we hold our child to keep them young forever) and even of time travel. In “Time,” the anthology moves from the past that leaves just a trace to the past that remains present through memory and ritual. “So We Shall Return,” by Calgarian Rona Altrows, provides a fitting ending to the anthology. “I forgive you for all of it,” says a woman who has just prepared her sister’s body for burial. That’s only part of what touch can do, if we let it.
Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.
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