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 in this remarkable second collection.

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“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 sonnet never before carried such 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.”

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—Billy Collins, Miller Williams Prize judge