The Lost Animals

"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 who 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