In a world where the poet is a filter, a cultural recombinator, this collection of poems sifts through the blur of data and stimulus to find the gold in the dross. The author explores the poetics of constraint and the practice of unconstrained writing. That pop song buzzing through your head? The TV show that’s become a guilty pleasure? That flock of pre-teens behind you on the subway? They’re all as “real” and poetic as classical tropes, archetypes, and forms. In Cain’s terms, context is always as important as content, and the quotidian is more expansive than ever imagined.

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.

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