[01/14/25] Nienow, Matthew: If Nothing

Alice James Books, paperback

Publication Date: January 14, 2025

Publisher Marketing: In If Nothing, the speaker confronts addiction, the learned behaviors and expectations of masculinity, fatherhood, and the feelings of guilt and shame, attempting to understand them better and in doing so, find redemption and forgiveness. The poems often call us to listen to ourselves closer and ask, how do we forgive ourselves? This is a book that wants readers to feel their feelings without shame or remorse. The tension between the physical and emotional, like the imagery of crafting with sharp tools in concert with the speaker's inebriated state, is well-wrought and moves us to feel the precariousness and delicate nature of the speaker's physical and emotional reality and the vulnerability that's exposed by the collision of the two. Earnest and vulnerable poems strive toward redemption, understanding, self-awareness, and the possibility of joy. The book feels almost like a second coming-of-age anthem, or one for the "real" coming of age-the one we all experience mid-life when things get real in a new way.