Bill Carty, John Okrent, Kary Wayson: Three Poets

1521 10th Avenue,Seattle WA 98122

12 July, 2022

Description

This program is scheduled to be live/in-person at Elliott Bay Book Company. This evening brings three poets from hereabouts to Elliott Bay to read from recent work. Going alphabetically, they are Bill Carty, John Okrent, and Kary Wayson.Seattle’s Bill Carty is here with his debut collection, Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books). “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.” — Matthew Rohrer. Tacoma physician/poet John Okrent’s quite timely This Costly Season (Arrowsmith) touches on what everyone has been dealing with the past few years. “John Okrent’s well-crafted crown of sonnets about being a doctor during the pandemic is unexpected and necessary, compulsively readable, haunting and hallucinatory. There is something both very ancient and very new about these eloquent, interlocking poems of worry, illness, supplication, and praise.”— Edward Hirsch. “This Costly Season is a defining poetry collection for our now ineluctable experience of plague. Like Petrarch, Keats, and Whitman, whose influence undertows these poems, Okrent is a poet who explores the metaphysics of mortality under pressure.”— Erin Belieu. Seattle poet, teacher, and poetry editor (Poetry Northwest) Kary Wayson’s most recent book is her award-winning collection, The Slip (Burnside Review). “The Slip is a lesson in music. The nuances of syntax and line break here are not just poetic measures: they’re roadmaps. These poems show us how to breathe. This is the kind of lyricism that lets us slow down and live. And that, dear reader, is precisely why I love Kary Wayson’s work.” — Ilya Kaminsky. This program is scheduled to be live/in-person at Elliott Bay Book Company.