Touching Ecuador is a long poem in four voices, following the interconnected observations of a modern-day tourist-traveller, a struggling castaway, a disillusioned preacher, and an Everyman weaver who tries to come to terms with mountain histories and a mountain home. Everywhere these four observers find a landscape rich in words: guidebooks and notebooks, calendars and woven letters, alphabets and beaded rituals, children's verses and the stories that populate place. Through their experience they move past security into the blessing of contradiction, finding at last "the breath to live by, /glimpses of connection . . . /the ambiguities of liberty."