“Zackary Medlin’s Beneath All Water examines the link between mental illness, addiction, grief and loss, and the ways in which language—which purports to transmit and encapsulate personal experience—unravels in the face of these circumstances. These poems, while syntactically accessible, are always sonically complex and rewarding. In “Left,” for example, we see “a cabin gutted by fire/until naught but black bones remain,/ stand scorched. Ribs of a roof/ that used to shelter shed soot/ like the antithesis of snow.” Medlin’s accentual, alliterative lines harken back to Anglo-Saxon verse, while never buckling under its influence. In his poems, images bloom out of images: the “blue burn of a flame” quickly “ignit[es] the purple bloom/ in the fields of fireweed.” These poems are gorgeous and unsettling; in his lyrics, the beauty of the physical world is both destabilizing and menacing, a beauty that’s echoed in the sonic richness of these lines which lull the reader into overlooking the brutality of their images. These are poems that demand careful attention, to be read out loud and savored.”

“Beneath All the Water, Zackary Medlin’s moving debut collection is a clear-eyed exploration of the struggle with addiction and the struggle to know and connect with those around us and, ultimately, the struggle to know one’s self. Medlin’s speaker is a keen observer of his surroundings whether in a mosh pit, along the back roads of the rural south, or in Fairbanks, Alaska. Medlin turns to pop culture and science to explore his queries of the self. Here you’ll find a series of poignant poems tempered with humor engaging pareidolia, our inclination to see significance in random patterns like seeing faces in clouds, that grapples with our ability to perceive and know our world. All of Medlin’s poems sing and pulse with the propulsive energy of thought as they wrestle with living in our vulnerable skins in this world. From the first page till the last, I’m grateful for the grace Beneath All the Water offers us all. ”