The work of New Brunswick poet Danny Jacobs is compulsive. It blends beautifully a kind of academic ascendancy with an overpopulated, everyday existence. His first book is ripe with intensely lyrical pieces about malls, call centres, houseflies and...the Higgs boson. Whether mundane or elaborate, Jacobs treats his subjects with great concentration. His description is gobsmacking, thick with alliteration and internal rhyming. His induction of modern jargon and use of left-field language is playful and clever, resulting in precipitous trips to the mind's pleasure centres. But what really makes this collection a success is that, beneath Jacobs' astounding linguistic feats, is a potent layer of emotional connection; especially in pieces like his award-winning "How To Shoot Skeet With my Grandfather's Lost Double Barrel" or the brief, engulfing "Three Fragments To Her Hand." To call this debut promising would be to do it a disservice: it delivers inventive, confident and delectable poetry time and again.