Scrap Book - (Alice James Award - Editor's Choice) by Nick Martino (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 postmemory: "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 same: to sift through memory, injury, and ego, and fashion from their own "scraps" a deeper understanding of what they carry.

Review Quotes

"Martino examines his own life through this lens. Through a scrapbook made up of poems, his mother's journal entries, and photographs, he explores how his father's incarceration shaped his life, the family history that influenced future generations, and the trauma and estrangement that can echo through a family over time."
--Elizabeth Cassillas, Katie Hulse, Alta

"In his gorgeous and arresting debut, Nick Martino hurtles through a variety of forms--from sonnets to visual poems to works of visual art--to vividly portray and reflect on a teenager's world during and after the speaker's parents' divorce and his father's incarceration."
--Craig Morgan Teicher, Literary Hub

"Martino's imagery, line breaks, and formal experimentation are striking, but it is his interrogation of an image's reliability that makes this collection utterly captivating. Scrap Book is a reckoning with how we remember those we love when our memories and artifacts lose their reliability with each recollection."
--Noel Quiñones, Muzzle Magazine

"Martino's debut collection lounges on Lake Michigan beaches, looks out on Milwaukee's skyline, and provides readers with myriad ways to enjoy these poems. ... Scrap Book asks what we inherit from our parents, what lies behind a broken relationship, and the meaning of conviction and the handcuff 'chaining us to memory.'"
--Abby McCabe, Booklist Starred Review

"Nick Martino's formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother's journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and incarceration."
--Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review

"Nick Martino's Scrap Book, as the collection's title suggests, is an elaborate mending of memory, a fractured mosaic of family. ... Martino mumbles memory into mad-lib, examines the grips of addiction, cleaves confessions from a father to scatter across index cards. Scrap Book is a collection well worth the journey it will take you on."
--Wroxy, Literati Bookstore Staff Picks

"In promotions for Martino's debut, you'll learn of the tactile elements: responses to scans of his mother's handwriting--her journal entries during his father's incarceration--and erasures of his own ekphrastic responses to polaroids of his parents. But the heart of this collection is Martino's devastating and assured lyric."
--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

"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, author of Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems

"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, author of Root Fractures

"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 C. Corral, Author of Guillotine: Poems

About the Author

Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection, Scrap Book (Alice James Books), won the 2024 Alice James Editors' Choice Award and will be published in 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.