Walking and Stealing by Stephen Cain

Image | Book cover: Walking and Stealing by Stephen Cain

Caption: Walking & Stealing is a poetry collection by Stephen Cain. (Book*hug Press)

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. (From Book*hug Press)
Stephen Cain is a Toronto-based author of six full-length collections of poetry and a dozen chapbooks, including False Friends, I Can Say Interpellation, Torontology, and dyslexicon. He also published a critical edition of bpNichol's early long poems: bp: beginnings. Cain teaches avant-garde and Canadian literature at York University.