Cold Dogs by Zan de Parry

The poems in Zan de Parry’s debut collection, Cold Dogs, teeter between deadpan humor and heartbreak, producing a new homegrown surrealism. Coupled with the poet's deceptively simple line drawings, these questioning and conversational poems operate on the sidelines of reason, dictated by human instinct. "He gently folded my head into my chest / And my face into my groin / Friend, let me show you an informal way / to achieve dreams." For readers familiar with the poems of Richard Brautigan and James Tate, Parry similarly travels in the bizarre, absurd, and existential, populating his poems with brilliant moments of heartfelt reverie and amusement. The matter-of-factness of the world perceived in Cold Dogs introduces a compelling and exciting sensibility to contemporary poetry. 

“This is the work of a unique poet. Zan asked me to write a blurb because he saw my work as a model. It is actually the opposite; I wish that I had written some of these wonderful poems myself.”
— Maged Zaher

“Zan de Parry starts with the familiar, a body, a cat, a still afternoon and holds our focus there until the uncanny emerges. A present moment drifting off to dream where the primitive urge bears its teeth against the order of civility. Taking us sideways where the past present and future coil around each other like film bunching up in a projector…what would that movie look like? What would those images be? A film where an orgasm turns into a pigeon or Jesus begs change from a kitten. There's something in these poems that I relate to very much…urges, denials, refutations of broken cities and broken worlds, comic horror leaking into the banal.” 
—Bill Nace

“Zan de Parry’s Cold Dogs reshuffles language against capitalist exploitation. Line drawings interact with verbal attempts to displace word and self: a tailless dog with a human head and prehensile thumb stands with unnatural joints below a disembodied second head, on a sheet of paper haunted by other mark-making efforts. In these poems, sound and rhyme are special engines that interfere with sense and push narrative into imagism then back into a different story. There’s an apocalyptic epochal energy in these poems, one less ‘Wasteland’ and more off-Oulipian, as if thesauruses and homophones were used in righteous anger against a world where algorithms have already found substitutes for our words and desires. Erotics are sinister and always also allegorical in this world of swaps. But there is a conviction that human existence, rendered supple amid closely observed consumerist hellscapes, might follow words in possessing the old gods, and should revel in their poetic flux.”
—Jennifer Nelson

Zan de Parry is a road dog for a tractor auction based out of southern Illinois, and runs KEITH LLC with his brother Matthew Hodges. Cold Dogs is his first full-length book of poems.