“I flow with him like quicksilver on an incline. I am the passive element, shifting with his center until we share one sweet spot, wordlessly agreed upon” reads a phrase in the opening chapter. Written in the present tense, Cusumano’s memoir reads as if she is recounting a long, strange dream. It begins with her departure from a disastrous break-up in the US. She decides to turn her tango vacation into an indefinite stay in a foreign land, leaving behind her past while trying to unpack that baggage in Argentina. Through her Zen practices, she connects her love for tango while attempting to find peace with the life she left behind.

I believe in airborne tango – and that exactly describes what it feels like. It feels as if the pull of gravity is no more or less than the press of the man’s palm against my own; no more or less than his torso against my torso; no more or less than his right arm’s pressure against my left side or than the pressure of my breath on my lungs;and equal, if opposite, to our horizontal momentum . In other words, it feels as if you could turn us sideways, inside-out, or upside-down and we’d still feel the dance same way. there is no more pressure on the balls of my feet than on my palms or back.

Each year, two million children worldwide die from diarrhea that could have been cured with an oral serum costing about fifteen cents, writes Carlos Alberto Morales Paitán, pediatric doctor at Children’s Hospital in Lima, Perú. But his email, which reached me via Argentine friends, was not about that too common tragedy.