Cold Dogs confronts readers with a triggering of the nerves that starts at the ears and eyes and pierces into conscience and community. Zan de Parry works with intense, small-town, middle-american forces, and pushes them to points of luminous implosion, which often feel like a bruising crowd crush of the senses in a town of empty streets. The poems are informed by hard labor, driving around, the politics of hearing and seeing, common violence, the dignity of farm animals, drugs, calls from friends, disgust at that part of ourselves and others who feels above anyone else, and stubborn, graceful dealings with how to be decent and dependable—how to “play fair,” to quote the first poem.

Cold Dogs, de Parry’s first book, is a recent release from The Song Cave, a meteoric imprint of the current small-press renaissance. It feels like almost every poet is starting a press these days (de Parry co-runs one called Keith LLC) and in this culture of friendly support, any one publication seems “neither / over ... nor under” any other, to quote Ivanna Baranova’s recent book from Metatron. But that said, Cold Dogs is an extraordinary first book, a true detonation on the water, and one we should be grateful for.

When de Parry says, “I thought nothing / Could anything the shit out of anything else” or “You grew through the awl howl / of the virginal garment,” it is clear that we are reading a poet whose grammar of word, image, and nerve is all his own. Many of the poems in Cold Dogs form tales, and in one of them “a neighbor boy,” sounding much like the poet himself, speaks to “the man” about “a nuance to his washing”: “I suds what I sees, and when I shower I suds nothing / And when I bath I suds the front half.” The agrammatic sound-play “beleaguered” the man, who “demanded the boy’s mom aware.” He reprimanded her, and uncomprehendingly asked “if one day the boy appeared cleaner than another / But by the willowing of her eyes was told she was not that kind of deputy.” De Parry’s poems give the slip to any effort like the man’s to get beyond the surface of language. Their surfaces are so taught that no chink is left for the dime-slot called meaning.

De Parry’s imagery of “green chicken” that is “pale and slick” and “covered in a ‘haze sauce’” might sound like a homegrown surrealism, but it is more likely just what a punk kid might see with their own eyes in Middle America. This representation of meat could be just literal in Dollar General lighting. I think Middle America used to mean the rural or suburban, agricultural or industrial cultures, landlocked and far away from the cosmopolitan capitals. Something like Frank Stanford’s America—small-town, hamstrung, morally crushed, and very violent—is where Cold Dogs works too. “We all got black envelopes,” Stanford writes, “Delivered at midnight, challenging us to a duel. / Either that, or send him snapshots of our daughters / And the second mortgages on our farms.” That’s from a poem titled “They really do,” which is easy to miss when we drive through the country and say “beautiful” at the old trucks and barns. Cold Dogs takes place in landscapes more familiar now—absurd, flashing, wired, explosive, somehow terrifying and hilarious. And it is through the mischief and even goofiness of that punk kid that de Parry abandons Stanford’s melancholic severity.

One of the tale-poems is an apocalyptic anti-pastoral called “Prostate Cancer,” and it might be read as a sort of creation myth of de Parry’s Middle America. “My friend’s father told me,” it begins, about a “plastic products” plant that treated its workers well—good food, even a chick coop. “Then the 90s came,” and the chickens got neglected, poisoned, and forgotten. Til one day they go to tear down the coop and discover something like mascots: “Bald, skinny, eyeballless, beakless appearances of hell, but shorter / And one acrid freak of a cock.” “The brazen, the lazy, the freaks of consciousness,” the poet sings in another piece. It's not that the punk kid is unafraid, he’s just there, and taking it in with a weird, cracked grace.

That his poems are sculpted by violence de Parry never lets us forget. After stealing “food wrapped in bright words as if the food itself could speak,” one poem recounts getting “shot with footprints in my face”:

The tableau of cruelties that follows betrays the despair in that sweet, sincere wish. One poem tells of a boy who, familiar with “the hissing strap” of his mother and the marks it leaves on his skin, gets a little brother:

That abused, calloused humor always feels jarring in this harrowing collection, but against our culture of high moral seriousness, it also makes for a funny amorality.

After all the play, sensuality, and horror, de Parry is ultimately a moralist, and one who confronts any sense of being “over ... or under” anyone else. In one of the only directly reproachful poems in the collection, the poet assails delusions of self-making: “You have a desire to achieve something – you go to study / Study well – you have a job.” The fable goes on: “You learn well – you have a very good job / ... you go to different measures / ... You drag it all home.” And the last line lands the moral gut-punch: “Some of you are proud – and that shakes me.” In a kindred poem, dedicated to “poachers,” the poet pleads with a character named Patheticus: “let’s calm down a bit, stop the game.” He implores Patheticus to “Think about the kid’s dinky one-watt light bulb. / ... Where does the light go? / Into the kid’s heart, into a mass of parasympathetic fibers. / That’s the source of the light.” The paradoxes taunt Patheticus, trying to teach him something. “PATHETICUS …”—in all caps, he’s not getting it—“Your first words came out the moment you were born. / You said, ‘my life is in your hands.’” Patheticus has left behind the “parasympathetic fibers” of the young heart, and Cold Dogs feels like a call for a collective leveling.

The closing poem, “Collecting Stones,” reveals the full involvement of these poems with the flawed human who is writing them. “I pick up a stone and take it to my face,” the tale begins, and the poet holds the stone in his mouth “out for the cat to lick.” The cat licks, and seems to become a lover or a spouse, and he rests his head on her chest, sighs, and begins to recite everyman resolutions—“I will work ... / I will have family, yes, yes”—which soon start to spiral: “I will leave ... / I will live to be an old man ... / I will be accepted as a woman ... / I will look into the face of another woman, yes.” Then he does leave to walk “to a river.” She follows and with his mother’s mouth sings to him as he baths:

The raw, heart-intact candor these poems are after finds its most simple, human epiphany in these final lines, along with the understanding that it is beyond us.

The profane illuminations of Cold Dogs must be shared, because it is usually impossible to tell who is suffering them. It is unlikely that even the poet knows who dreams the great collective of the book’s first poem:

The illuminations of Cold Dogs get weirdly close to Walt Whitman’s visions of an anti-hierarchical, sensually involved, revolutionary “adhesiveness” between all. De Parry is thankfully much more funny and irreverent than Whitman, but that never stops his work from being an abrasive confrontation to any casual or passive contemporary existence. Cold Dogs’ gifts to us are startling, profane occasions of what it feels like