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 detournement (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 pre-emptive military strikes to U.S. foreign policy.

Humorous, yet politically insightful, I Can Say Interpellation is for very smart kids�and for adults who want to keep them that way.

Author of three poetry collections, American Standard/Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005), Torontology (ECW, 2001), and dyslexicon (Coach House, 1999), Stephen Cain has been a literary editor at Queen Street Quarterly and is currently a fiction editor at Insomniac Press. Cain’s work has been widely anthologized. Cain lives in Toronto.

Jay MillAr’s full-length books include The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), Mycological Studies (2002), and False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), and many privately published editions. Jay is the proprietor of Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, and also runs BookThug, an independent publishing house specializing in contemporary work. He lives in Toronto with his wife Hazel and their two sons Reid and Cole.

Stephen Cain's profile page

Clelia Scala's profile page

“Parody is the frame for what Stephen Cain is doing here, but the value of the satirical commentary in the poems is far deeper and far more resonant. This is a book for adults, particularly left-leaning adults with children to whom they have read the originals of these poems over and over and over again. Parody with a healthy dose of moral outrage. The illustrations by Clelia Scala work perfectly with the text, with collages that pair familiar images from fifties domestic scenes and Victorian illustration, with memento mori that highlight the theme of death and destruction in so many of the poems.” —4 Mothers Blog

“Reflecting on the absurdity of our world in simple children’s rhymes and tales, this collection charmed me. Cain has the delightful way of spinning each tale to suit his purpose and the results are often as hilarious as they are uncomfortably recognizable.” —Broken Pencil