Search results for ""Author Stephen Cain""

A double-lunged bong hit of mid-Eighties post-punk college rock, Gertrude Stein, art films, and the comedic legacy of Laurel and Hardy (including such great standup teams as HD and Ezra Pound, Jesus and Judas, and Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). Jeff Derksen says: 'If reading is sixty-nining, then dyslexicon satisfies at both ends. Stephen Cain disentangles everyday life into its constituent emotional, intellectual, sexual and cultural parts -- people, the city, books, music - only to recombine them into a new set of relations ...It's a sexy m-f of a book. Put it on your turntables.'

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With Canada / US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain's third book blenderizes 'pop' culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border. From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical 'History of Canada,' this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen. American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Quebecois lyrics. Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they're your passport to the land of a new political poetry.

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