Huge Cloudy

Author: Bill Carty

Publisher: Octopus Books (2019)

In his debut collection Huge Cloudy, Bill Carty attends to the world, bringing thought to vision with a cartographer's sense of scale, and a shipbuilder's attention to detail. Alternating stretches of lyric narrative with longer serial poems, Huge Cloudy proceeds by a Ship of Theseus poetics. Like a series of field notes, the poems document change as the contemporary landscape is revised by big and small forces—the bank vault that becomes an open mic, the pond that becomes condos, the puddle of vomit to walk around. These poems attend to the ugliness of a world, of a history, or poetic lineage, with a magic map. Drawing as much from the neighborhoods of Seattle as from coastal environs, this is a collection that folds the map—a kind of bounding sphere—in on itself.