Finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Craig Blais’s Moon News 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.
Read the preface, by Billy Collins. (PDF)
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 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.”
—Billy Collins, Series Editor
“William Carlos Williams is one of the guiding spirits of these poems. Craig Blais takes one of Williams’s maxims (“There is no need to explain or compare. Make it and it is a poem”) and teases other meanings out of it, until these poems become prayers, and the prayers a way to survive. These are poems of grieving, while in Blais’s hands flowers ‘are unlike ghosts, with their constant // appeals to be noticed, to be something they’re not— / friendly, solid, observable bodies—instead / of being what they really are: barely there.’ The possibility of transformation in these poems is thrilling.”
—Nick Flynn
“Craig Blais’s Moon News should come with the warning: ‘objects in poems are more complicated than they appear.’ These poems drill deep beneath their deceptively casual voice to reveal complex insights—the dark humor of Blais’s punch lines have real punch as we laugh through the pain of recognition, or the recognition of pain. Blais might be part Whitman, part Frank O’Hara in his inclusion of the daily scraps of life, but in these wholly original poems, those scraps erupt into stunning conflagrations. Add some W. C. Williams—quoted and riffed on in this brilliant book—and the fact that the poems are all sonnets, and you get a jack-in-the-box jumping out of every one. Blais is the guy who pulls up next to you on the road with his own jumper cables and gets you started when you thought your engine might be dead forever.”
—Jim Daniels
“Craig Blais is a full-service poet. You see that from the get-go when he writes about flowers and DUIs in the same poem. Descartes, hockey, home movies, William Butler Yeats, split pea soup, Tom Brady: it’s all here, all laid out musically yet with impeccable control. Craig Blais is a night owl. Craig Blais is an astronaut who takes us to the moon and back. Craig Blais is a kid again: he sees the world with wondering eyes in these splendid poems, and we do, too.”
—David Kirby
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry.
