Stephen Cain

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.

Weary of saccharine stories and tired themes when reading poetry for children? Angered at seeing your children indoctrinated into adhering to patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, and general compliance with authority each time they open a book of verse? I Can Say Interpellation remedies these problems by reconfiguring some of the best-known children's rhymes for political purpose. Taking French theorist Guy Debord's idea of detournement (a deflection or divergence of existing visual images and mass media), and applying it to children's poetry, experimental poet Stephen Cain redeploys the rhymes and images of well-known juvenile poems against their dominant messages. The result is a new poetic landscape where the Fox in Socks becomes Marx on a Box, where "Goodnight Moon" is a meditation on possible nuclear annihilation, and "The Owl and the Pussycat" features debates on the importance of pre-emptive military strikes to U. S. foreign policy. Humorous, yet politically insightful, I Can Say Interpellation is for very smart kids�and for adults who want to keep them that way.

Fictional languages are central to numerous creative works. This book examines such languages in a wide range of literature, films, and television shows. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on particular works. Many of these works are widely taught, such as All's Well That Ends Well, Gulliver's Travels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Utopia, while others are popular books, films, and television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cat's Cradle, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars. Thus the encyclopedia helps students understand texts central to the curriculum and popular culture. Each entry discusses the role of imaginary languages in a particular work. Entries range from antiquity to the present and close with suggestions for further reading. The encyclopedia ends with a selected bibliography and includes various helpful finding aids. Some of the most popular creative works are appealing because of the artificial worlds their authors create. In many of these works, fictional languages are essential to the setting and plot, and often help the author comment on social issues. This encyclopedia examines fictional and fantastic languages in a broad range of literature, films, and television shows. Each entry discusses the features of the invented language central to the work and relates it to the film, literary text, or television program. Entries provide suggestions for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected bibliography. Because many of the works discussed are central to the curriculum, the Encyclopedia will help students understand these texts and the importance of language. At the same time, the volume's coverage of popular books, films, and television series invites students to explore more critically those works that are most likely to interest them.

With Canada / US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain's third book blenderizes 'pop' culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border. From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical 'History of Canada,' this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen. American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Quebecois lyrics. Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they're your passport to the land of a new political poetry.

A double-lunged bong hit of mid-Eighties post-punk college rock, Gertrude Stein, art films, and the comedic legacy of Laurel and Hardy (including such great standup teams as HD and Ezra Pound, Jesus and Judas, and Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). Jeff Derksen says: 'If reading is sixty-nining, then dyslexicon satisfies at both ends. Stephen Cain disentangles everyday life into its constituent emotional, intellectual, sexual and cultural parts -- people, the city, books, music - only to recombine them into a new set of relations ... It's a sexy m-f of a book. Put it on your turntables.'