Daring Touch includes the translation of two poetry books by Louise Cotnoir, The Audacity of Hands and Tell Me I’m Imagining This. In The Audacity of Hands (1987) Cotnoir explores the double nature of hands. Firstly, she proposes poems that display the negative forces of hands that inflict pain, cause damage, kill. She affirms, secondly, their positive qualities: hands touch, caress, create. The hand is knowledge expressing both suffering and gentleness, disfigurement and beauty. In Tell Me I’m Imagining This (1996), Louise Cotnoir probes the concept of barbarism, past and present acts of cruelty. By wandering through various artistic utterances, a woman witnesses and listens to the cacophony destroying our world.

‘Each term leads to a space of unforeseen meanings into which we fall and lose our sense of being. Though the verses are simple, short, and clear, their logical connection pull us backward into that infinite place where words have yet to be been formulated.’
~ André Brochu, Voix et Images

Louise Cotnoir is the author of more than twenty books. In 1996, Tell Me I’m Imagining This was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. In 2016, she published a collection of poems entitled Vanessa Bell soeur de Virginia Woolf, and, in 2017, Le frère d’Antigone, her first novel.