“Moon News, finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize,” writes Billy Collins, “can be seen as the unlikely marriage of Charles Bukowski and Sir Philip Sidney, but of course, that doesn’t do justice to Craig Blais, who is a strong and engaging poet in his own right. We can say that Moon News is a collection of sonnets if we allow that a poem cast in the basic shape of a sonnet is a sonnet. The shadow of the English sonnet is visible here: fourteen lines divided into three quatrains and the couplet. But the quatrains are not grammatical units as they tend to be with the Elizabethans; rather, they run on into the next quatrain and finally into the couplet, amen. This is the more urgent, jumpy sonnet in which the poet talks through the shape of the poem, hurrying ahead until he feels the couplet nearing; then he finds a way to use the two remaining lines to close the poem up.”
The cover is designed by Kat Lynch.
Things Craig Blais noticed right away looking at Kat Lynch’s cover design for Moon News:
- How the light/dark treatment is at once stark and engaging.
- How the vertical arrangement creates an optical illusion that appears simultaneously aligned and askew.
- How the new moon looks like a halo from a Raphael painting.
- How the spacing of the moon phases subtlety mimic the pattern of the poems in the book, which are 14-liners arranged as three quatrains and one couplet set to repeat: 4-4-4-2.
- How the handwritten scrawl of the title feels imperfect and urgent.
Things he discovered upon further inspection:
- How the night sky is textured with white fibers that give it the appearance of felt or expensive construction paper.
- How the moon craters are not craters at all but Jackson Pollock-like paint splatters and drips.
- How the moons seem to have been cut from the felt sky with an X-Acto knife.
- How difficult it is to tell if the sky is in the foreground or background.
- How there might be one big abstract expressionist moon behind it all.
“Kat Lynch’s cover design for Moon News,” Blais writes, “is bold, thoughtful and, like the moon itself, it warrants multiple viewings.”
Craig Blais is the author of About Crows, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the Florida Book Award. A finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and National Poetry Series, his poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Los Angeles Review, The Southern Review, and the Yale Review. He is an associate professor of English at Anna Maria College and lives in Massachusetts.
Moon News will be published in March 2021. It is available now for preorders.