Background
The human sense of touch is ‘the first sense to develop in the womb and the last sense one loses with age’ and yet it is often the most overlooked of the senses (Krishna 2012: 335). There is a special intimacy associated with touch because our skin is required to make physical contact in order to register touch – and, unlike the other senses, we have the ability to sense touch all over our bodies. This is one of the reasons why the somatic pleasure of touch has serious consequences when it is unwanted or forced; when it is a negative touch.
This portfolio addresses the sense of touch as primal.
Contribution
This portfolio makes intertextual use of both Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) to explore powerful responses to sex through the charged utterances of love and heartbreak. Stephen M Phelps asks, ‘Can we learn how a fleeting touch drives a frenzied heart, or why the delay between contact and withdrawal can span a decade? An answer worthy of our effort should begin at the skin’s surface, yet somehow end in poetry’ (2017: n.p.). This portfolio honours that notion.
Significance
This work was commissioned by the most famous contemporary practising poet in America, Peter Johnson. It is an international anthology of the finest prose poets from America, Australia and the UK. The majority of the poets showcased in the book are multi-award winning. This demonstrates my international reputation as one of the world's most skilled prose poets.
Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual Work
Scale
NTRO Other
Publisher
MadHat Press
Place of publication
Asheville, N.C.
Source
Dreaming Awake New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom