Moon News has been named a finalist for the 2022 Housatonic Book Award.

A finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and selected by Billy Collins, 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.

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.

The mission of the Housatonic Book Awards is to promote excellent writing, to identify authors who serve as professional role models for writing students, and to develop the WCSU MFA in Creative and Professional Writing Program scholarship fund.