A personal journey through the senses shows that sensitivity can be our greatest strength.

One family member’s disappearance, another’s belief in androids, and the unsettling realization that she could smell a dangerous secret are among the experiences that trained Lise Ragbir’s senses—a string of events teaching her to be less sensitive, to know when to brace, when to go quiet, when to comply. Drawing from her family’s history in the Caribbean and her own experiences in Canada and the United States, Lise examines how sensitivity is suppressed by migration, race, inheritance, and survival—and how we learn to harden ourselves. Generation after generation, layer after layer, this hardness stacks, forming chasms into which softness disappears.

Soft is a rediscovery of the senses. Not just the five we learn as children, but the fuller, stranger range of how a body knows the world. For Lise, they map a reckoning with everything she learned to stop feeling, and everything her body never forgot. Sensitivity, it turns out, can feel like magic.

Anyone who has ever been told "don’t cry" will see themselves here as Lise insists that being soft is a resistance. And a wisdom.