Beyond touch (Paperback)

Arja Salafranca's new poetry collection offers portraits of people on trains in England, as well as recounting the experience of being a stranger in Spain, where she was born. She treads warily on the icy streets of London, but returns years later to have a life-changing epiphany while rowing on the Thames. Her incisive, photographic gaze penetrates the lives of people, from an Indonesian woman in the sea to a child begging in Johannesburg. Yet the poetry is also personal, as it traces the slow but inevitable unwinding of a relationship. And then there’s an erotic intimacy, where love goes beyond touch.