Offering a ‘word of skin’, Anne Michaels’ ‘Into Arrival’ touches on the ways that the skin might be written about, written on and written into being. Pointing to the intimate relationship between the page and the surface of the body, the poem not only suggests that the skin signifies, but also indicates opportunities for it to be read, and re-read differently. Identifying this bond, Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey argue that the skin and writing are both ‘processes that involve materiality and signification, limits and possibilities, thought and affect, difference and identity’. The skin's capacity to signify, moreover, leads them to conclude that we cannot think about the skin without touching on its ‘writerly effect’. This book is an examination of the relationship between writing and the surface of the body, considering not only the writing-effects of the skin, but also the ways that the text is like a skin, shedding, exposing and dissolving its own limits. And if the text functions like a skin, what happens, it asks, when a work of literature moves or touches us? As Virginia Woolf seems to indicate, touch can take place on a textual as well as a corporeal level. Insisting that it is the writer's task to ‘get into touch’ with the reader, Woolf points to the tactile exchanges inherent in acts of reading and writing. Drawing on a range of work by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, and considering the ‘skineffects’ of language, this book explores the relationship between text and tact. In the following pages, we think about how texts touch not only their readers, but also touch on themselves and each other.