Scrap Book

by Nick Martino

Scrap Book, the debut collection from Nick Martino, is a lyric, hybrid exploration of his father’s prison sentence and its aftermath—an inherited history marked by silence, fracture, shame, and addiction. Weaving poems with invented forms, familial documents, and fragmented memory, Martino constructs an autoethnographic study of carceral trauma and its reverberations across generations.


Set within a Midwestern family home along the shores of Lake Michigan, Scrap Book draws on Marianne Hirsch’s theory of “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply.” Interwoven with poems grounded in a familial archive—such as journal entries and Polaroids of Martino's father in prison—the collection uses the idea of photographic development as a framework for exploring how insight into family history can emerge gradually, like an image appearing in a darkroom.


Through its use of ekphrasis and archival fragments, Scrap Book creates a textural interior landscape in which the speaker wrestles with how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. Ultimately, Scrap Book is a work of gathering and repair—a lyrical stitching-together of fragments in search of meaning. In reassembling the family archive, Martino opens a space for readers to do the to sift through memory, injury, and ego, and fashion from their own “scraps” a deeper understanding of what they carry.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2026

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

My early Shelf Awareness review: Scrap Book, the lustrous debut collection by Nick Martino, arose from a Midwestern upbringing in a broken family. In particular, his father's incarceration--from before the poet was born--casts a long shadow.

These 40 poems draw inspiration from Martino's mother's journal and family photographs. The imagery spotlights the surrounding Midwest farm country. "I was raised inside the meadow of my parents'/ broken marriage. Even as a child, I understood. How often I was called to mend/ their love." The poet felt, by turns, protected or abandoned. "From her, I inherit the soft armor/ absence makes"--an oxymoron that contrasts with the realism of the paternal legacy: "From my father, I inherit silence/ and bad timing." Closer to the present, the speaker escapes loneliness through recreational drug use and fondly watching a lover sleeping. Love and meaning are salvaged from family wreckage in the same way one might "look/ for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed" orchard.

One series of poems brilliantly transforms photographs into hidden-message text. Eight are titled "Polaroid: Prison Visit," followed by a 1989 date stamp. A prose description of his mother's visit to his incarcerated father on that day appears within a photo-sized frame. Selective use of bold type creates, across several pages, one or two erasure poems that reveal the emotional reality beneath appearances (such as four sentences being reduced to "My mother turning to the/ prison/ He/ lied."). Partial scenes assemble, just like on the book's collage cover. Handwritten passages from his mother's journal are interspersed with the text and sometimes complete lines of poetry. Meanwhile, her observations of the colors of Lake Michigan provide a calm counterpoint to traumatic memories.

Free verse alternates with forms: an unrhymed sonnet, an aubade, and a "duplex"--invented by Jericho Brown. "QVC" presents a grid of words and phrases (e.g. "basketball tickets," "dementia," and "set of copper pans") and instructs the reader to "cut along the dotted line" to fill in the blanks of a Mad Libs-type story on the facing page. Alliteration and assonance ("the plummet/ and the tumult/ of an earth-bound body") sparkle, and two poems employ anaphora. Throughout, the metaphorical language impresses with its originality and precision: "moonlight/ waterfalls the plastic blinds"; "stoned as the gargoyles in heaven"; and "I slide back/ into the knife block of silence."

Pairing novelty of form and expression with psychological insight, Scrap Book is a triumph.

(Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)

[Kaylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to the Waukesha Library for getting this poetry collection in front of me.
Martino's poems conveyed emotion in a way that felt universally human- lost, confused, and alone.
I connected with many of the recurring themes and devices: crows, the moon, Lake Michigan, the body. Here are few of my favorite lines:

"Duet of us attending to the vanished"

"I call for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed, I call the whole blue ache to me, but with the plummet and the tumult of an earth-bound body, I can't help what I love."

"Before I left, I packed the stars into a blunt to blue the air."

"Hunger gives me gills, pulls me gasping at the shore of fevered relief. It feels so good to nurse a need that I can meet."

"I am two crows laughing in a poison eucalyptus. I am friendless and dead-eyed in the Empire State."

"Sky a hammer of frostbitten stars."

"September in the way the clouds unspool as lambswool."

"But silence was a kind of lie, one pain crouching inside of another."

"Your light both here and elsewhere, forever and never at all, amen."

[DeeSoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know she must love the birds
in her own way. It's my job to open the door.
- pg 18, "Wild Birds Unlimited"

Martino's debut asks what we asks what we make of memory, even when they are not our own, even when they challenge the memories we already have. The poems of this collection hold a tenderness that does not ignore its own hurt: quick/ to anger, flashing white, my hunger vining/ up and up and up and up my throat, the speaker writes in a poem reflecting on the tumult of his adolescent understanding. In Martino's Polaroid form & poems, information is reveled to us over pages, context reframing the scene as color & clarity inform our vision. This collection is an ocean you'll have to dive into to appreciate its care & lyric.

[Sergiy Pustogarov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of considerations about love, hurt, and growth within the difficult stances of consequences secondary to actions.
Within these pieces we see beautiful art, particularly Nick’s Polaroid poems which contain multiple poems within each, constantly growing their view and education upon a topic.

[Scott Kuffel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful collection of writing.. much of it based on the poet’s reading of his mother’s journal. The journal was written during his father’s incarceration. The visual display of the poems was also engaging.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, my—what a fabulous debut collection! The poet holds no quarter, describing the blue ache of the bulldozed boy, the addicts’ solipsism, the prison and its family of inmates replete with Polaroid mugshots. A necessary read, especially for those in recovery, atoning for all the debris and destruction left behind. Intriguing text-based artwork amplifies the emotional impact of the poet’s fixations.

“Love: I know I can outstarve it.”
—from “The Road Map,” p. 10


Favorite Poems:
“Love Poem”
“Fire Blight”
“My Mother Was the Cornfield”
“The Road Map”
“Mother’s Little Husband”
“Wild Birds Unlimited”
“Diatomaceous Earth”
“Ladder at the Bottom of the Lake”
“Polaroid: Prison Visit, September 7, 1989”
“QVC”
“Polaroid: Prison Visit, August 20, 1989”
“Elsewhere”
“Desire Is a Duplex”