Craig Blais’s Moon News, a finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, deploys the sonnet form to treat subjects as diverse as Gregor Samsa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the cosmos. Here the form’s capaciousness is engaged to full effect. Blais, who turned to the sonnet as a method for focusing on the present in the early days of his recovery from alcoholism, confronts personal demons, loss, and the possibility for healing. These aren’t your grandmother’s sonnets—though you might find her pea soup recipe or sex tape in this remarkable second collection.
“Moon News,” series editor Billy Collins wrote, “is a dazzling collection of fully American sonnets. To read these poems is to be both enclosed by the sonnet’s chalk lines and released by the wildness of the content. The form rarely carried such severe cargo: heroin, hospital rooms, poems growing out of trees and out of a person’s open hand…. This is the sonnet repurposed for our time.”
Craig Blais is the author of About Crows, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the Florida Book Award. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Los Angeles Review, the Southern Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English at Anna Maria College.
Moon News is now available, and 25% off when you order at uapress.com.