Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty

by Bahar Orang

Book*hug, 2020; 114 pages; $20

Reviewed by Jessica Key

Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty melds lyric essay with prose poetry, and like the art of kintsugi it is a unique and gorgeous fusion.

Bahar Orang is both poet and physician-in-training, and Where Things Touch finds beauty and reflection even in the most intense and clinical elements of the world of medicine, while also exploring different forms of intimacy — in romantic and sexual relationships, between doctor and patient, and between the body and self.

While its size might lend itself to finishing it in one sitting, ideally during a sun-dappled afternoon as atmospheric as the book itself, the length of these poem-essays and the insights within them inspire pause and reflection. To read and re-read and ponder alongside the author as she uses beauty to examine philosophy, queerness, pain, freedom, and more. Although different in style and in scope, the very-short essays reminded me of another recent favourite, Rebent Sinner by Ivan Coyote — both in what they are able to accomplish with relatively few words and in the ways the essays in both collections bounce off of each other, at once distinct and connected.

This book is full of intersections. It intersects in form — poetry vs. non-fiction. It shows intersections in the narrator’s life when pondering intimacy, queerness, and home. It also intersects the liminal, arguably indefinable concept of beauty juxtaposed against the world of science and medicine: and narrative. In one section, Orang considers memory and the way it lives in our bodies, after recounting doing a medical procedure on a toddler, and wondering what they may remember of it. In another, she lays on the ground with her lover and prays that their smell, and their memory, never causes her harm.

“Medical dictionaries define ‘third space’ as the non-functional area between cells that when filled with fluid become dangerous. And ‘third-spacing,’ as physicians call it, is highly concerning in the biomedical sense — when the heart, lungs, or abdomen become flooded. but in a poetic or aesthetic mode, third-spacing is like a sidestep, a discernment or an improvisation, straying from the established path to follow beauty into unknowingness.”

The loose narrative of the book mirrors the feeling of reading it — the excitement of meeting a new lover, the cyclical paths of conversation you chase while wanting to know everything about them, and at the end, a subtle shift in topic from beauty to love.

These cyclical paths are beats of repetition throughout the book that layer understanding and narrative. In one section, Orang considers memory and the way it lives in our bodies, after recounting doing a medical procedure on a toddler, and wondering what they may remember of it. In another, she lays on the ground with her lover and prays that their smell, and their memory, never causes her harm.

One of those repetitions, obviously, is on beauty. A standout section included: “Beauty, like memory, can only be defined provisionally. There is no complete essay to write on beauty, no final word, no quintessential image. Please understand, beauty is not a problem to be solved; beauty is not a question to be answered; beauty denies enclosure or straightforwardness. Beauty is something opening, and if you are lucky, the thing opening is you, your body, your palms and your feet, so you are more surface to press against the earth.”

The idea of a poet writing essays on beauty and poetry risked feeling expected — but Orang subverted my expectations. In her own words: “Regarding most things as poetry is not my business with the world — studying poems is rigorous business. Though rigour and romance need not be different modes.” poetry, like beauty, is both precious and not-precious. These poetic essays are simultaneously incisive and gentle, like medicine should be.