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. 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.
Zan de Parry lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and is a road dog for a tractor auction based out of southern Illinois. He has published multiple chapbooks including Vibraphone (Brest Press), Hennie (Tabloid Presse) and History, Memory, Love, America, Syllogism (Amateur Press). He also runs Keith LLC with his brother Matthew Hodges, with whom he co-authored the full-length Austerity Brunch (Keith LLC). Cold Dogs is his first full-length book of poems.