Walking and Stealing

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.