Ungentle Touch—Poems from the Fireplace of Arrested Love

Ungentle Touch: Poems from the fireplace of arrested love is Titus Bonie Moetsabi’s third published collection of poetry, bringing together soft and light verse on the subject of love and relationships, particularly those that are subjected to separation and distance. Here are more than forty poems that mix sensuality and philosophy in a playful manner as they explore the different aspects of love and longing. At times arousing, at times tender, Ungentle Touch is a highly personal book of poetry composed by Moetsabi while living and working in Kabul, Afghanistan, some four thousand miles away from his wife and family in Harare, Zimbabwe.Ungentle Touch has a universal appeal that speaks across borders and cultures. The poems draw upon the poet’s first-hand experiences of missing his wife, children, friends, and home during periods of absence, while also revealing the comfort and hospitality afforded to him by his hosts in the more than forty cities and four different continents he has visited in his lifetime. It is an evocative and emotional volume that casts the poet as an itinerant troubadour who travels to the ends of the earth facing hardship, conflict, and the possibility of death in order to protect and provide for his wife, children, relatives, friends, and native homeland. As such, it is the lyrical, plaintive song of a brave warrior crying for love, reflecting on love, and awaiting reunion with loved ones.This is sensual poetry about mutual yearning and the promise of an eventual, ecstatic homecoming. Beyond the physical and sexual, the poems also map the landscape of other loves—spiritual, national, reflexive, political, social, and natural—as well as the paradoxes of love. Powerful and passionate, delicate and sensitive, Ungentle Touch captures the mixture of feelings, fantasy, and shared realities experienced by lovers enduring separation, solitude, and sacrifice while navigating feelings of longing, agony, and hope.