Cloud Cantata

Carla Harryman’s canny Cloud Cantata puts before us a set of inexhaustible, unhurried conversational moments into which diverse quotidian and increasingly pressing topics arrive. Perhaps the moments are sequential—it seems to be morning, though “morning” here is a relative term. Breakfast seems variously either underway, in preparation, or just finished, and repeatedly one or the other of the conversants mentions something about a dream of the night before. And, too, the phrase “January to September 2021” appears on the title page. Or perhaps, as I prefer to think, they are vivid alternative versions of a long, multifaceted moment of emergent dialogue, each iteration of which refuses to be hastened to some end. It is morning, after all; incipience is in the air. And for that moment—for the sake of that moment—it is possible to greet the world, even in the throes of its tragedies. Cloud Cantata enacts that possibility, summoning onto the scene bravery and play. It’s magnificent. 
—Lyn Hejinian 

"In Carla Harryman’s Cloud Cantata, the archive is first and foremost that storehouse of memories, desires, and “voices” comprising the unconscious, one from which we “borrow” every time we dream and, most important, speak or write. The cloud, a repository of digital materials, is also an archive insofar as its “contents” enter, and thus form, its parameters. But what is accessed, what is downloaded, from the cloud is not the “same” material(s) uploaded even when the “content” appears to be an exact match. The march of time does not cease inside or outside any archive. And just as the unconscious is subject to corrupting forces in the form of, say, false memories or psychic pathogens, so too digital materials may be subject to corruption and error even if the corrosive environments of the cloud differ from those that imperil analog archives. "   
—from Tyrone Williams' review on Cloud Cantata at Restless Messengers: Poetry In Review