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 kidsï??and for adults who want to keep them that way.

Author of three poetry collections, American Standard/Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005), Torontology (ECW, 2001), and dyslexicon (Coach House, 1999), Stephen Cain has been a literary editor at Queen Street Quarterly and is currently a fiction editor at Insomniac Press. Cain’s work has been widely anthologized. Cain lives in Toronto.

Jay MillAr’s full-length books include The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), Mycological Studies (2002), and False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), and many privately published editions. Jay is the proprietor of Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, and also runs BookThug, an independent publishing house specializing in contemporary work. He lives in Toronto with his wife Hazel and their two sons Reid and Cole.

Stephen Cain's profile page

Clelia Scala's profile page