Wednesday, August 14th, 7PM
Poet Bill Carty reads from his debut collection, HUGE CLOUDY, with poets Stacey Tran and James Gendron
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.
Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, and others. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018; Black Ocean, 2019). She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, identity. The series was founded in 2017 and has featured over 100 storytellers across 8 US cities. Stacey currently lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.
James Gendron is the author of Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) and Weirde Sister. His poems have appeared in Tin House, The PEN Poetry Series, Witch Craft Magazine, Pinwheel Journal, and Fence.
