I Have Touched You

Fiction. Winner of DARK SKY MAGAZINE's 2010 chapbook contest, Gregory Sherl's I HAVE TOUCHED YOU is a debut collection of linked stories exploring the hurt, drive, remorse and pleasure of fleeting relationships and casual sex. Through rapt, often kinky language and quick-fire observations, Sherl's stories linger and provoke, presenting the reader with a series of swollen hearts, unmade beds, and potent narratives. "If Tao Lin put the heart back into his writing, exchanged the bored neutrality for a sense of hope or lust or longing, we would have Gregory Sherl's I HAVE TOUCHED YOU. As with Lin, there are the musical references, the mapping of movements, and a diary of food and drink and drug ingestion, but instead of trapping them inside a forever monotonous plain, Sherl elongates them into beauty and rifle-fires them from a language-musket, something at once wonderfully matured and yet able to open gaping holes in our chests"—J. A. Tyler.