My Thieves

My Thieves is a study of the relationships between the visual and literary arts, and is also a meditation on the nature of creativity and artistic authenticity. Paquin, a poet with great interest in painting and the visual arts in general, writes about those artists across disciplines who've influenced him using a wide range of poetic structures and forms. At the heart of the book is the concern that perhaps the creative individual is merely an imitator of all the art he has ever admired; at the book's center is the fear that the "self" is just a collection of other selves absorbed through one's lifetime.