Matthew Nienow’s debut collection, House of Water, was published by Alice James Books in 2016. His poems have appeared in such venues as Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. A former Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, he has also received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and two sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

"'Love is showing up so fully it hurts,' Matthew Nienow writes, and indeed he shows up here in full. These are poems of startling vulnerability, poems of addiction and despair and the wake they carve through a marriage, through fatherhood, through a self. But the thing about a wake is that the water comes back together, however changed. If Nothing doesn’t bare loss gratuitously. No, it sees—it sings—loss through to its many lessons. This book makes work of loss, and anyone who reads this poet will come to recognize that work and love go hand in hand."
—Corey Van Landingham

"'I walked straight into the fire and took my place amongst the ash,' writes Matthew Nienow. The result is If Nothing, a bracing collection that digs into the ashes of addiction, marriage, and fatherhood to discover what the tree knows under the carpenter’s chisel, that loss can also be abundance."
—Tomás Q. Morin

"'If you can live with loss, the soul grows bright,' Matthew Nienow writes in this clear-eyed and resonant book. His voice never wavers. Addiction and mental health and shame are rendered in searingly alive language. His vulnerability is radical listening—to masculinity, to loneliness, to family, to betrayal. In these deftly crafted poems, loss shines bright, but grace shines brighter."
—Eduardo C. Corral