Poetry. From its opening riposte to the militarism of the current U.S. government, to its closing satire of Canadian culture, AMERICAN STANDARD/CANADA DRY surveys nation and identity on both sides of the border. Stephen Cain's third collection also includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, as well as concrete poetry, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on Canadian history and dialect. Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humor, the poems interrogate poetics and nationalism as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard.

Author City: TORONTO, ON CAN

Stephen Cain is the author of four poetry collections—I CAN SAY INTERPELLATION (2011), AMERICAN STANDARD/CANADA DRY (2005), Torontology (2001), and DYSLEXICON (1998)—and a collaborative series of micro-fictions, Double Helix (2006), written with Jay MillAr. He is also co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (2006). He lives in Toronto where has been a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly and fiction editor at Insomniac Press.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Kim Minkus @ Jacket