Beneath All Water
Beneath All Water
Beneath All Water
By Zack Medlin
April 2024 • 6 x 9 • 84 pages • 979-8-9883272-2-6
"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."
—Paisley Rekdal
Zackary Medlin grew up in South Carolina, ran away to Alaska, spent some time in Utah, and recently started calling Colorado home. His poetry has appeared in The Boiler, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Tinderbox Poetry, and others. He holds an M.A./M.F.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, and now teaches writing at Fort Lewis College. He lives in Bayfield with his partner, their cat, and the hummingbirds, foxes, and mule deer that have graciously decided to share the yard with them.