Poetry. Art by Clelia Scala. Weary of saccharine stories and tired themes when reading poetry for children? Angered at seeing your children indoctrinated into adhering to patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, and general compliance with authority each time they open a book of verse? I CAN SAY INTERPELLATION remedies these problems by reconfiguring some of the best-known children's rhymes for political purpose. Taking French theorist Guy Debord's idea of détournement (a deflection or divergence of existing visual images and mass media), and applying it to children's poetry, experimental poet Stephen Cain redeploys the rhymes and images of well-known juvenile poems against their dominant messages. The result is a new poetic landscape where the Fox in Socks becomes Marx on a Box, where Goodnight Moon is a meditation on possible nuclear annihilation, and "The Owl and the Pussycat" features debates on the importance of preemptive military strikes to U.S. foreign policy.

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