Given his desire to know the street map with his feet, it is unsurprising that the act of walking should play such a prominent role in Carson's writing. Indeed, his is a distinctively peripatetic aesthetic. Time and again walking serves not only as a means of registering urban experience, the medium through which all manner of encounters, associations, and sidelong observations are made; it also functions as a figure for the meandering, digressive nature of Carson's narratives, in which ‘one thing leads to another’ (FFA, 152) much as the pedestrian wends her way through the divagating and interconnecting streets of the city. Form and content echo and reinforce each other in this respect, and in both his poetry and his prose Carson's wayward stories are very often told by narrators travelling on foot. This is true even of his translations, as the opening lines of The Inferno and The Midnight Court respectively show:

The implicit connection here between ‘strolling’, ‘wandering’, and ‘straying’ is important, for, as Rebecca Solnit observes, walking need not necessarily have a fixed destination but may serve as ‘a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences’.