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The New Layman's Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney
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The New Layman's Almanac

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The New Layman's Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney
Paperback $14.95
Mar 18, 2008 | ISBN 9780771054075

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  • $14.95

    Mar 18, 2008 | ISBN 9780771054075

    Buy from Other Retailers:

Product Details

Praise

“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 Mail

Author Essay

The New Layman’s Almanac is a medium-sized book written in the English language. It is a re-stylization of the almanacs and home guides that were a major force in early Canadian publishing. As a collection, its primary question is: What are the rules? Specifically, what in our culture is available for irony, and what needs to be protected? What is sacred and what is spiritually expendable? What benefits from formal packaging and what doesn’t?

Drawing on more modern publishing phenomenon with the same self-improvement kick (Wikipedia would be chief among them), the collection tries to cobble together the memories available to the author (memories both personal and shared) in order to study how the inheritances of his generation, inheritances material and intellectual, prepare an individual to find the logic in his or her life story. Plus, there’s some jokes. And, sadly, five or six poems in which somebody has to die.
— Jacob McArthur Mooney

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