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.

Praise for Walking and Stealing

“Equal parts logophilic love song and searing post-punk lament, Stephen Cain’s Walking and Stealing is a Molotov cocktail for the city dweller’s soul. With playful constraints and sprawling seriality, Cain takes us on psychogeographic drifts and dérives, sends us spinning through allusive urban thickets, and leads us on unapologetic intertextual joyrides through a city and a world on fire. This sauntering tome is whip-smart and shady AF—a semiotic feast at every turn.” —Kate Siklosi, author of Selvage

“Since the late ‘90s, Stephen Cain has stayed in the game to drive the line with work marked by his commitment to the local, intertextual, and communal. Walking and Stealing sees Cain at his most raucous. These poems are fully loaded—they crack, cut, dive, and play double. With a poetics steeped in devotion to the unorthodox, Cain proves himself again to be one of Canada’s foremost avant-gardists who continues to expand the field.” —Eric Schmaltz, author of Surfaces and Borderblur Poetics

Press Coverage

Fall 2024 Adult Preview: Poetry —Publishers Weekly