Knoxville, 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.
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