An unsentimental and at times disquieting first collection, the poems of About Crows excavate self, family, race, location, sex, art, and religion to uncover the artifacts of a succession of traumas that the speaker does not always experience firsthand but carries with him to refashion into some new importance. This is a book of half-states, broken affiliations, and dislocation. The speaker leads the reader through the fragments of a flooded town that grows increasingly elusive the more one looks for it; through a succession of Seoul "love motels" that further displace the outsider to unclaimed margins transformed into sites of creative invention; through "galleries" of artwork, where movement, color, and image are renewed through ekphrasis; and through the world of the metatextual long poem "The Cult Poem," where good and bad moral binaries tangle into a rat's nest of our best and worst spiritual ambitions. The poems and sequences of About Crows are marked by their artistic balance of the sublime and the profane, of polyphony, syntactical complexity, clashing images, cagey humor, and unsettling sincerity, all trying desperately to connect.

About the Author
Craig Blais was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in such literary journals as Bellingham Review, Best New Poets, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Pinch, Sentence, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.


Reviews
"Craig Blais is a tremendous talent. About Crows is a tremendous debut."-Terrance Hayes, Felix Pollak Prize judge and National Book Award winner|"These haunting, elegant poems are painted with smoke and the colors of the evening sky, and I feel as though I'm peering into rather than merely reading them. Each promises that something is about to happen; the tension they create is irresistible, and as I turn the pages, I find myself drumming my fingers in anticipation and thinking, 'More, please-more.'"-David Kirby


Awards
Commended for Florida Book Award (Poetry) 2014.



Book Information
ISBN 9780299291945
Author Craig Blais
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint University of Wisconsin Press
Publisher University of Wisconsin Press
Weight(grams) 123g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 178mm * 10mm