The New Layman's Almanac

Deft and dazzling, brash and boyish, Jacob McArthur Mooney makes his debut on the poetry scene with a rare combination of verbal pyrotechnics and honest emotion. Using manic word-charm and an open heart, Mooney invents a prosody for the twenty-first century. With a passionate wisdom about the frustrations of how humans connect, these poems surprise us with protean language and satisfy us with wry, earthy sense.“A rollicking debut from a young enthusiast with some of Walt Whitman’s beaming sincerity. . . . Mooney takes authentic and big literary risks, by exploring sincere emotionality, genuine political belief and considered poetic experiment. . . . This is Canada speaking, loud, clear, quirky and unashamed to be itself. This is surely one of the most audacious and fresh poetic debuts of the new Canadian century.”
- Globe and MailJacob McArthur Mooney is a Nova Scotian now living in Mississauga, Ontario. He is an editor with the always controversial web journal ThievesJargon.com and the founder of The Facebook Review. A graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland, he is currently an MFA student at the University of Guelph. His work has been widely published, and in 2006 he was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award in Poetry. The New Layman’s Almanac is his first book.A Guide to Enjambment


I
woke up and the girls who
lived across the street were
pretending to be cowboys. They had
two sticks with horse heads affixed to
the ends, they were galloping down
the one-lane laughing, experts at improbably mapping
a four-legged system’s
gait
in bipedal half-time. I
heard of drummers that can work
like that, one arm banging out two-four and the other, three-eight on the same kit. It’s
easy to see how
the act of expression
grows
from an awkward
stutter-
step, the point where
chaos becomes
chance, becomes
order, becomes
time.Poems