The Back Cover

Hannah Stephenson

The New Layman’s Almanac, Jacob McArthur Mooney

Jacob McArthur Mooney’s debut collection of poetry, The New Layman’s Almanac, comes with instructions: “Rotate 90 degrees clockwise [for best readability].” Accordingly, Mooney’s book appears to be a manual or encyclopedia; each poem’s title in the main section begins with the words “A Guide to.” Though these poems appear to explain something, as they borrow the form of a reference book, Mooney’s instructions are wilfully obscure, experimental, and playful.

The New Layman’s Almanac is hyper-structured and self-referential. The opening poem, “A Guide to Locomotion,” begins with the encyclopedia-esque suggestion “See also: ‘night blindness’; ‘perceived stress as a variable in experimental design’.” Each guide poem shares this form, directing the reader to either another poem in the collection, a definition, or the work of another author.

Mooney’s most successful poems explore accessible subjects — rainstorms, reckless driving, taxes, ex-girlfriends. One clear standout is “A Guide to Alternate Histories,” which directs the reader to “[s]ee also: ‘the first summer post-high school’.” The poem begins with placid instructions: “Take a step to the left. Take another. There/ was this photograph I shrugged off once/ while moving, me and the hard local girl...” Mooney shocks the reader in the final stanza, recounting, “They found her in a cornfield, fingers clawed into/ the soil, as if she spent her last seconds praying for/ return.” 

The other poems in the book are packaged as an appendix. “Various World: The Pinsky Variations” is a section of poems modelled on a form by poet Robert Pinsky, in which each word of a poem begins with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. Mooney wrote 26 of these impressive and strange little ditties. While the idea is astoundingly original, I struggled with these often syntax-challenged poems. For instance, in “Nightmares,” the poet explains, “At bedtime, child-dreamers envision falcons, gorillas, hyenas./ Illusions jar kids...” The last section is similarly problematic (yet cohesive); each poem’s title begins with “The Difference Between,” and concludes with two completely incongruous elements (such as “The Difference Between English Standards and the Angles of an Isosceles Triangle”).