A familiar & favorite terror

Zackary Medlin
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:04 PDT

The collection A Familiar & Favorite Terror explores love and violence, how the two are entangled and how that entanglement is constitutive of a self. It wants to show how love is a form of violence to the self, demanding a fracture. These poems view love, and not just romantic love, as a breaking of the self, both in its binding and its severing. With love there is always a hole, or a not quite whole. That's where these poems want to dig - but not dig up - and sift through the ways we fill this void. And while this collection is decidedly personal, tracing it lineage through books such as John Berryman's Dream Songs and Robert Lowell's Life Studies, it is not confessional - there is rarely guilt or shame associated with the speaker. Instead, the self in these poems, and the poems themselves, are unapologetically postmodern; if Berryman and Lowell are ancestors to these poems, then their immediate family would be contemporary poets like Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, and Matthew Zapruder. These poems build their foundation on the unstable, seismically active terrain of pop-culture and the mutable, multiple self that peoples that land. They are at times lyrical, surreal, referential, earnestly ironic, ironically earnest, recursive, discursive, and maybe even downright ugly. Ultimately, however, even though these poems are disparate insular experiences of a self, they are reaching out in the only way they know how to: by existing in the world. The speakers, by sharing these experiences, are asking the question: `I'm not alone it this, am I?' which is also a way of telling a reader, 'No, you are not alone in this.'