Tag: press release

Sundress Publications Releases David Cazden’s The Lost Animals

ImageKnoxville, TN- Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of David Cazden’s second full-length poetry collection, The Lost Animals, a lingering book that explores themes of mankind versus nature. The poems are hushed, evocative, and physically tangible to all the senses—a collection any lover of nature and human intimacy should own.

Cazden’s poems are unapologetically hungry for wilderness, raw tastes and physical, emotional relationships. The speakers have smudges on their wrists, hair like volcanic skies, and are ‘part of the earth’s alphabet/its language of bone.’ Even in sorrow, their lungs inflate and deflate like balloons. Cazden paints cooking dinner as titillating, almost erotic, and driving through traffic as a nostalgic journey. These poems impress with a total engagement of the senses and frank emotion coupled with a persevering urge toward the rational.

“David Cazden’s anticipated second collection, The Lost Animals, takes us from cemetery where animals nibble moss off headstones to a high-rise apartment to the sand fences of Fort Lauderdale. Through poems deliberate in their story and interlaced with images, we find exquisite and sensual language based in landscape and the natural world: ‘Here your body unwound / while winter’s clothing piled up, / its cold ground spreading for miles, / curtained in white, freckled by crows.’ Cazden’s poems take us into the details of living and relationships where we can settle into a world where ‘pears illuminate the neighborhood’ and ‘each surface melting / at the faintest touch.’ Each poem is layered with moments and a constant nod to time here on this robust earth and with the animals that live there.”

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Hourglass Museum & Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room

“As the title of Dave Cazden’s wonderful book portends, loss is at the heart of this sure-handed and memorable new collection. These are felt and moving poems—from the death of a long-ago lover (‘Nicotiana, Jasmine alata’) to the break-up of a relationship to the death of a brother from a drug overdose (‘Voyage’). Through his use of lush metaphors and sharp-edged imagery, Cazden shows us how, in poem after poem, art can transform pain.”

-Jeff Worley, author of A Little Luck, winner of the 2012 X.J. Kennedy Prize from Texas Review Press

David Cazden is the author of the full-length collection Moving Picture. He began writing poetry in 1999 and has been published in numerous journals including Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, Stirring, and Apple Valley Review. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Kentucky, Cazden has also edited the poetry magazine Miller’s Pond for over six years.

The Lost Animals is now available at Sundress Publications.

Sundress Releases Donna Vorreyer’s A House of Many Windows

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KNOXVILLE, TN—Sundress Publications proudly announces the release of Donna Vorreyer’s book, A House of Many Windows. Vorreyer poems take their time. The well-crafted poetry in this book is rhythmically stunning, as each piece whether breathless or meandering, moves the reader along at a precise pace, unfolding feeling and circumstance with artisan-like skill. The focus is on the body as a world unto itself, and Vorreyer maps this body with clear curiousity, yearning and awe.

 

A House of Many Windows is concerned with fate, trial and circumstance, and confronting loss with courage and honesty. It is remarkably subtle how a sense of unease creeps into many of these poems, always emerging from behind a curtain – an ever-present sidekick readers thought they lost pages ago. Vorreyer’s subjects are insightful and fearless, whether they are eloquent in the throes of romantic love or muted by a bittersweet combination of sorrow and a prevailing enthusiasm for everyday beauty. The intimacy of the writing suits the subject of the body, so that readers truly feel submerged in water, or curled into a restless sleep. They are invited to access grief and desire on a carnal level. The speakers treat every day with ceremony, glorify all things natural, and contribute a sense that human beings are united by their flaws. These poems are humble yet expertly built, unafraid to be vulnerable, and constructed with refined, climactic intensity the like of which is impossible to resist.

 

Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, remarks on A House of Many Windows: “The poems that comprise this enviable collection are unflinching and fearless, crafting new definitions for the definition of woman—as mother, as lover, as flawed and singular being. Donna Vorreyer has written these revelatory verses from the caverns of her own body—her commitment to the breath of each stanza is formidable. And that’s why this book is unforgettable.”

 

Laura McCullough, founder and editor-in-chief of Mead, also finds beauty in Vorreyer’s poetry saying, “these brave, sometimes elegiac poems are about caring, about how one goes on even when the weight of intense feeling is crippling. Desire, loss, the humble and glorious body, the great subjects of what it means to be human are deftly exfoliated in these poems of disassemblage and re-creation.”

 

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four chapbooks: The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife (Redbird Chapbooks), Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press), Come Out, Virginia (Naked Mannekin Press), and Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press). She is a poetry editor for Mixed Fruit, and her work has appeared in many journals, recently in Sweet, Linebreak, Rhino, Cider Press Review, Stirring, and Wicked Alice. Donna lives in the Chicago area where she teaches middle school and therefore often acts like she is twelve years old.

 

A House of Many Windows is now available for sale at sundresspublications.com.