Submitted by: Macy Cloninger, mcloninger@cub.uca.edu on 03/11/2026
On March 9, Kelsay Books released a new poetry collection from Michael Blanchard, an adjunct professor in UCA’s School of Language and Literature. Titled The Things of This World, the new book has been described as a celebration of and meditation on the power and fragility of the physical world that allows us to experience beauty, love, joy, and also sorrow.
In one early review, an editor of Southern Literary Review champions the collection as Blanchard’s “most powerful collection to date” and notes, “He gracefully blends the philosophical, the reflective, and the personal, all with a scholar’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the music in language. With his precise control over form, he creates free verse rich in sensory imagery, discovery, and intellectual depth—haunting, immersive, and exacting. Rooted in Southern sensibilities, these poems frequently meditate on memory and aging but also reach further to conjure landscapes both physical and emotional.”
North Carolina poet Michael Hettich, inaugural recipient of the School’s Hudson-Fowler Prize in Poetry, adds, “Blanchard’s poems bring us into the presence of a genuinely humane person, a poet who speaks with the modesty of deep experience and well-honed craft. This poet practices what might be called a spiritual poetry, a poetry that opens our eyes and hearts to profound mysteries of being. His explorations of the transformational moments of perception and memory remind me at times of the Chinese masters and at others of the Christian mystics—but always the poems resonate with his own unique and carefully-modulated voice.”
Blanchard joined the UCA faculty in the fall semester of 2018 as part of what was then the English Department. In addition to his teaching duties, he serves as editor of SLANT, the School of Language & Literature’s international journal of contemporary poetry. He is also an active member of the Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas, the state’s unofficial poetry society, and was elected to the board of that group in April of 2005.
The Things of This World is Blanchard’s fifth book, beginning with his debut collection, Naming the Silence, in 2017. His poetry has also appeared in Alabama Literary Review, Quarry, Voyeur, Cave Region Review, MockingHeart Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Streetlight Magazine, among others.
