Modjaji Books, Dye Hard Press, and Love Books are delighted to invite you to the launch of Arja Salafranca’s new collection of poetry, Beyond Touch. Deirdre Byrne will be in conversation with Arja Salafranca. Arja will also read from her new collection.
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.
“Beyond Touch is a profound and evocative voyage of discovery towards self-realisation, surrender and an exhilarating “rush at life”, to the ultimate destination of an unexpected and achingly tender love. Arja Salafranca is one of South Africa’s finest contemporary poets and this collection deserves to be widely read and celebrated.”
– Michelle McGrane
There has always been a sense of separateness in Salafranca’s poems – even alienation – from the experience the poet carefully observes. While language allows the poet to record the world, capture it like a photograph, it also succeeds in creating an othering. Yet there is a shift in intimacy in the latter parts of this collection, surrender, perhaps, to an experience that evades the eclipse of words.”
–Alan Finlay
“Arja Salafranca proves here that the most effective poetry is always direct, concrete and singular. And, above all, frank. Even if it makes us flinch in recognition. Even if it leaves us slightly devastated. Certainly different.”
– Kobus Moolman
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 09 June 2015
- Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
- Venue: Love Books, The Bamboo Lifestyle Centre, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville, Johannesburg
- Guest Speaker: Deidre Byrne
- Refreshments: Come and join us for a glass of wine
- RSVP: Love Books, kate@lovebooks.co.za, 011 726 7408
www.modjajibooks.co.za
- Beyond Touch by Arja Salafranca
Book Homepage
EAN: 9781920590543
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