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.

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Antonio D'Alfonso was born in Montreal. He studied at Loyola College from 1970 to 1975, where he got his B.A. in Communication Arts. Later on he went to Université de Montréal to complete his Master's Science Degree in Communication Studies, specializing in Semiology; his thesis was on Mouchette, a film by Robert Bresson. In 1978 he founded Guernica Editions, where he edited over 450 books by authors from around the world. In 1982 along with three other writers, he founds the trilingual magazine, Vice Versa. In 1986, along with three other writers, he founded the Association of Italian-Canadian writers. He has taught at Université of Montréal, Continuing Studies at University of Toronto, University of Californa, in San Diego. He is presently a writer in residence at McGill University (French language and literature department).

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