Walking and Stealing

by 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.

120 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2024

Reviews

[Solomon Goudsward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cain’s poetry is playfully intertextual and associative, evoking a stream of consciousness influenced by baseball, geopolitics, critical theory, and the urban geography of the Greater Toronto Area. Don’t come here for a story, a cohesive scene or an apt image. Come running through a vibrant psyche and slide into home.

[Lorna]

Even for poetry this makes no sense to me. I do not get it and just.. no thank you.