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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

I dream of Bill Carty finding my copy of Bill Carty's Huge Cloudy on the streets of Tucson—where, in the course of a long walk with my eight month old daughter, and while reading, or, more accurately, listening to it (like to a Greatest Hits) start-to-finish, I dropped it, several times—and, like he does on page 45—actually, on every page, in every line—picking up/checking out and observing, with arousing clarity—and often in the form of revision as a process of rigorous affirmation by catechism—the trace (the tracing) of the experience of walking while reading/listening to his poems into materialization, which is, I think, synonymous with exactly what he did, only Huge Cloudy is the world, and the reader—who I thought, at first, was me—fortunately, for us, is Bill Carty.

– Brandon Shimoda

Bill Carty’s Huge Cloudy waves its arms around a weather map like an octopus as meteorologist—ridiculously smart, smartly ridiculous. This book pays homage to daily absurdity, to relishing in the delight of what makes us human. These poems loiter around in shops, ships, stoops, bounding spheres—at once profound and hilarious: “Wore my blue / shirt today. / It was too blue. / Gave me away.” Carty’s language is stunning in its strangeness: “bollix birthed,” “butterfly split by lightning,” “plum-purple, we were, / lucking into new years.” Images turn corners with “animal velocity,” so that we have to stop, look up, and declare: wait, what did I just read?

– Jane Wong

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

These poems desire to pretend to be as light as down, mere cottonwood fluff on the breeze—a thing that tickles or delights. And they are light, like a featherweight boxer on the balls of his toes right before he lands the punch that breaks your jaw. There is much to admire here in terms of play and wit, but Carty makes clear that, as with all enduring art, it is our very humanity—at its most beautiful and most hideous—that is at stake in these poems. I read this book at the playground, on a boat, and within the hallowed halls of one of our government's many waiting rooms. At each encounter, it was a relief to feel the weight of these poems pinning me to the wildly spinning world.

– Keetje Kuipers

Huge Cloudy feels like it was written by a poet who’s been writing for two hundred years, like the debut of a wandering time traveler. Each poem appears as a lone cloud in a time-ridden sky. Clearly, poems of the past have long kept Carty company and I predict that his poems—with their huge capacity for attention, questions, and surprise connections—will keep future readers company for years to come, in all weather.

– Jennifer Tseng