While the field of haptic aesthetics has received significant critical interest in recent years, the intimate connection between touching and writing remains neglected. Contributing to current debates in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between text and tact. Through close readings of authors such as John Berger, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Carson, Siri Hustvedt, and Michael Ondaatje, the volume proposes a theory of ‘tactile poetics’ in order to examine the co-implication of touch and writing in a range of genres including the novel, poetry, short fiction, autobiography and film. Drawing on insights from Didier Anzieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Luc Nancy, Tactile Poetics examines the ‘skin-effects’ of language and the ‘law of tact’ that always interrupts contact. Celebrating the intersections between creative and critical writing and exploring diverse literary textures, this book deviates from grasping and licking to false hands and phantom limbs, considering the effects of spectral contact on how we ‘hand on’ ways of thinking about reading and writing.

ground-breaking * Forum for Modern Language Studies Volume 52, Issue 2 *
Tactile Poetics takes excellent care of the intellectual and imaginative possibilities of its subject. Jackson's lucid, subtle engagement with touch and associated topics combines a poet's sensitivity, scholar's rigour and thinker's curiosity. Her book belongs alongside classic studies by Anzieu, Connor and Nancy. -- Dr Sarah Wood * University of Kent and Guild of Psychotherapists *
Tactile Poetics　is an original and compelling study. It is also, in its singularly gentle manner, a work of pressing importance. Interweaving lucid and thought-provoking expositions of Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy and others, with deft and inventive readings of an adventurous range of recent fictional and poetic texts, Jackson’s book shows how the subject of touch is at the heart of contemporary writing and theory. -- Professor Nicholas Royle * University of Sussex *

Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Arts and Environment and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Northumbria University. Working at the intersections of literature, art and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice, her books include Pelt (2012; awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry 2013); Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015); and Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (2023). Bringing together creative and critical practice, her current work focuses on geopoetics, displacement and sound.