Huge Cloudy

Book excerpt: Poetry. 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.