“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