False Friends is the first full-length poetry collection from Stephen Cain in more than ten years. In it, he takes inspiration from the linguistic term "false friends"--two words from different languages that appear to be related, but have fundamentally different meanings. In this book are poems both humourous and unforgiving that Cain uses to explore errors, misapprehensions, and mistranslations and offer insights into the "secret operations" hiding within everyday language.
These poems spin punk with pastoral, comic book with lyric, the misunderstood with the obvious. And at its core, False Friends is a thought-provoking investigation of the power of poetry as political dicourse.

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

"In False Friends, Cain revels in a play of sound and meaning, bouncing his narrative as a pinball across the field of language."—rob mclennan's blog

"In False Friends, Cain revels in a play of sound and meaning, bouncing his narrative as a pinball across the field of language."—rob mclennan's blog