False Friends is the first full-length poetry collection from Stephen Cain in more than ten years. In it, he takes inspiration from the linguistic term false friends –two words from different languages that appear to be related, but have fundamentally different meanings. In this book are poems both humourous and unforgiving that Cain uses to explore errors, misapprehensions, and mistranslations and offer insights into the secret operations hiding within everyday language.

These poems spin punk with pastoral, comic book with lyric, the misunderstood with the obvious. And at its core, False Friends is a thought-provoking investigation of the power of poetry as political dicourse.

Praise for False Friends

In False Friends, Cain revels in a play of sound and meaning, bouncing his narrative as a pinball across the field of language. –rob mclennan’s blog