Paperback, 111 pages

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.

Being inside a Bill Carty poem is like going on a walk to the corner store for a bag of chips and on the way getting an unexpected natural history lesson whose insights deftly link, sometimes with the hinge of a single word, this history to your life, which of course was never unrelated to begin with, and at once the connections between things sharpen, and perception tilts as you sense, more acutely, the shape of what had settled over you (for how long now?), as the poem speaks the temporary name of this shape aloud just before it shifts its form, and all of this feels somehow normal, and also sacred but not in an overdetermined way, and in the end you get your chips and they are just as good as you hoped. No, they’re better.

—Ari Banias

HUGE CLOUDY is hugely entertaining. Reading it you will be reminded of the particular delights of highly-specialized words. These formally varied poems resemble, and move like, limber little forest creatures, and what comes next is always a surprise. Carty is at home with the satisfying little facts of nature, the frustrations of politics and its annoying little sidekick, the media, as well as human introspection and what can only be described as magic. All of that is in here, in these poems that are as breezy and permeable to the day as can be, and they are very fun. I think I smiled the whole time.

—Matthew Rohrer