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: TBD