Scrap Book
Scrap Book
Nick Martino
The 2024 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
“Just over halfway into this searing and tender debut, Nick Martino writes, ‘I confess to regarding my father / as a villain in my mother’s history / of fire, incarceration, and silence.’ This confession is remarkable not because it lays succinctly bare the core of Scrap Book’s project, but because it is a found poem taken from one of the book’s ‘Polaroid’ poem series. Isolated from the fabric of a(n erased) longer poem as if manifested using a cookie cutter, the poem is fragment, is both the tight quarters of a prison cell and also the (w)hole of the collection. Scrap Book gathers memories—the speaker’s as a child, that of one’s parents; it pores over a mother’s handwriting, zooming into swirls of a letter until the word is unrecognizable, composing with the family archive in order to unearth and assert the presence of a future self—an unborn son birthed and grown up. This is a deeply intimate, immaculately crafted, lyrical auto-ethnographic documentation of the unspoken hungers within a family. I am forever altered by its intimate investigations.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen
June 2026
ISBN: 9781949944792
Available in both print and digital formats.
Photo credit: Mimi Connelly.
Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His work is published or forthcoming from Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Seventh Wave, The Los Angeles Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and was the winner of the program’s 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.
Additional Praise:
“Scrap Book is a striking and ambitious debut. For Nick Martino, love is non-linear and layered. The first devotions rattle the present and the future; regret ripples through devotion. Hard-won observations about family and the self are as exhilarating as the imagery and phrasing. The language will stay with you. The language will surprise you. Cursive script tightens and explodes on the page. Recasting erasure poetry as ‘Polaroids’ is ingenious, impactful. Martino has written an inimitable first book.“
—Eduardo Corral
"In Nick Martino’s Scrap Book, love and fear blur together in the context of family trauma, addiction, estrangement, and the intimacies that can become their own rescuing landscape, filling in the distances between parent and child. Meanwhile, Martino’s inventiveness with form enacts the restlessness of memory, its shapeshifting qualities in the face of a human impulse to know what was true, whom to trust. I loved the surprise, the tenderness, and the fearless precision of these poems; Scrap Book is an exciting debut, indeed."
—Carl Phillips
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