reviewed on April 10, 2025

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For as long as I have known his name, I have regarded Matthew Nienow with that particular combination of envy and admiration which one writer feels most acutely for another of similar background and subject matter.  Not only had Nienow just won a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and not only had he landed his debut collection, House of Water, with the highly enviable Alice James Books, but he had earned an associate degree in Traditional Small Craft from the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, and had been making his living—a fact that both astonished and humiliated me—building custom wooden boats and paddleboards in the Pacific Northwest. 

 

He had seemed, in other words, precisely the kind of working-class, white male poet I had wanted to become, and was by all accounts one of the kindest and most compassionate writers anyone who knew him had ever met.

 

I writhed with shame and resentment.

 

Though I liked House of Water—in 2017, as I see in my notes, I seem to have rated it a five out of ten, no doubt still stinging from Nienow’s success—his second collection strikes me as a marked stride forward for one of the few well-known writers to dare to examine the rhetorical and material production—and the lived experience—of working-class masculinity in original ways.  If Nothing is a large-hearted and clear-eyed meditation on the obligations of being a man and father, freighted as those subject positions are with sometimes perilous inheritances.  In the second poem in the book, “Every Gift Carries a Cost,” Nienow receives a knife from his grandfather, symbol and synecdoche for the work and potential violences involved in American masculinity.  Halfway through the book, that knife returns in figurative form.  “The thing about this going forward,” Nienow writes in “Begin Again,” “is that you must bear the burning, your skin taken right off, so that even the smallest wind // is a knife, even the breath of a lover, or a child, will tear at you, for a time, at least.”

 

Revising received notions of masculinity, the recurrence of his grandfather’s knife exemplifies the great care that Nienow has taken in the structure and organization of If Nothing.  It is one of the most thoughtfully plotted—or sectioned, or laid out, or arced—collections I have  encountered, from its image patterning to its intellectual trajectories to the poems that begin and end each section.  Tracking forward from Nienow’s inheritances, the book lays bare his increasingly disruptive addictions to alcohol and marijuana and the way they shape his early experience of fatherhood, in particular what Hayden called its “chronic angers.”  The book’s first section ends, though, with a putting-away of childish things, and with Nienow’s imagined self-immolation:

 

I could not go a day without

thinking of        very specifically     how

 

to kill myself and that I should

my god     how deep that well

 

seemed to be    how

pointless its depth

                              and so

 

I walked straight into the fire and took

my place amongst the ash.

 

Mythic in its resonances, the passage sets up neatly the beginning of the book’s second section, where Nienow announces that “[a]fter years of binge     my hunger / was suddenly gone. […] I was inside with no story / to save me from myself.”  From that moment forward, If Nothing traces a getting-clean akin to the planing away of wood’s imperfections, as Nienow accesses and then cultivates an inner self-reliance evocative too of Robert Pinsky’s “Samurai Song.”  “I bow down into myself,” Nienow writes.  “It must be so.”

 

By the end of If Nothing, as evident in a late poem like “Letter of Recommendation,” Nienow arrives at a buoyant, ode-like gratitude absent the sentimental hysteria that sometimes characterizes the mode:

 

I am writing on behalf of the wind in my son’s hair,

which, at least in this photograph, is always there for him,

always cooling his cheeks and suggesting new scents

from over yon dale, you know the one, just out

of sight from the cidery yard where his friends run

with him into the alchemical twilight, which clothes

every living thing in the ephemeral silk of youth.

 

Whereas earlier he had hidden away with the “[l]ights off in the shop, hoping no one comes to the door,” adrift in the inwardness of shame and self-loathing, an older and wiser Nienow “suspend[s] / my smallness, my isolation lie, and join[s] in among the strands, / taking care to affirm the thread, an end in each hand, / to become one with the work of keeping things together.”  “I took off my shame,” he writes in the book’s closing poem, “And Then,” “like a dress made of light,” a last-poem annunciation for which I have been able to think of no more accurate comparison than the closing shot of Gravity.

 

I belabor the intellectual and narrative trajectories of If Nothing only to demonstrate the craft with which its structure has been worked.  But the book is not without flaws. The late introduction of attention-deficit disorder and the perils of antidepressants, for instance, feels like a bridge too far in the “litany of my trauma” mode, like a cover letter which begins with a catalog of the writer’s intersectional afflictions.  And while Nienow’s relatively plain language counterpoints nicely with his workmanlike sense of line—as it does in someone like Seamus Heaney—he is sometimes too recognizable in his borrowings, as when he ends a poem “I have wasted so many days” or trots out the familiar adage that “some debts / take more than // one lifetime / to pay down.”

 

It is hardly surprising, however, that nearly a decade has passed since Nienow’s debut; If Nothing shows the kind of manuscript one might produce given that duration and given the intensity of the labor that must have went into it.  Nine years is Marie-Howe-long between books, and is almost unheard of in an era of inflated academic credentialing and given the compulsion to elbow out one’s space in the social media spotlight.

 

Nienow has eschewed both pressures, to his credit.  And he has produced a strong sophomore collection deserving not only of the starred—if uninspired—review it received in Publishers Weekly, but of wide and celebratory recognition in the coming year.