Walking and Stealing

In this triptych of serial poems steeped in baseball and Toronto, Stephen Cain considers urban affairs and culture through playful, revelatory devices.

＂Walking & Stealing＂ was composed between innings of his son’s little league baseball games. The sport becomes a site for explorations of duration, association, and subjectivity. The ninety-nine poems of ＂Intentional Walks＂ follow mapped routes throughout the city to study the relationship between thinking and walking. The nine cantos in ＂Tag & Run＂ are constructed using baseball’s magic number nine, creating a literary puzzle in which the author ＂tags＂ a series of moments in time.

Together, these works skewer traditional, masculinist, and often-solipsistic perspectives on where we live and inhabit, instead offering a new way to consider the relationship between culture and space. Walking and Stealing is where memes meet psychogeography in a collection from a brilliant poet at the top of their game.

STEPHEN CAIN is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and a dozen chapbooks, including False Friends, I Can Say Interpellation, Zoom, Etc Phrases, American Standard/ Canada Dry, Torontology, and dyslexicon. His academic publications include The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (co-written with Tim Conley) and a critical edition of bpNichol’s early long poems: bp: beginnings. He lives in Toronto where he teaches avant-garde and Canadian literature at York University.