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.

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.

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