Matthew Nienow’s If Nothing is a book without illusions. It doesn’t search for transformation and it doesn’t care about transcendence, yet ends up finding both. The very first poem, “On the Condition of Being Born,” sets that register by folding the poet’s own origin story into the act of fatherhood. The speaker watches his sons arrive into the world (mirroring his own rebirth), and instead of swelling toward sentiment, the poem contracts. The focus is cellular: muscle, blood, breath. What Nienow captures here, and throughout the book, is the proximity of his fatherhood to obliteration. These are not poems that celebrate parenting. They are poems about trying to remain visible to your children while disintegrating.

A collection of reckonings, If Nothing peels away the hardened veneer of survival to reveal the raw, red essence of what it means to live and love in a fractured world, especially as you deal with the guilt of fracturing it yourself. The result is an incantation, a map of the human spirit etched in chiaroscuro—of pain and longing, tenderness and grace.

The title, “If Nothing,” carries the open-ended heft of a condition without resolution. Nienow, here, holds a vacancy without rushing to fill it. It carries multiplicities (and I love it for that): a conditional clause without a conclusion; a threat against oblivion; a whispered invitation to consider what remains. I found myself reading it as both noun and plea: if nothing else, if nothing remains, if nothing is possible… then what? Really, is it an elegy for loss? A koan of survival? A glimmer of possibility in the void? The poems offer no single answer—but they do answer, again and again, with language that insists on consequence.

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my immaculate tongue always 

ready to indulge

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the deluge of a want 

I mislabeled need

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even though years pass 

in which I bow & bow

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to nothing nothing

bows back

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— from “Four Years to the Day”

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The poems operate like field notes from a life on the edge of collapsing—emotionally, biologically, financially, spiritually. You can feel the speaker trying to stay inside his body. From the outset, Nienow wastes no time in naming what so many spend their lives avoiding. “As you were, then. As you were / at the moment of your first breath,” he writes, returning to a state before fracture, before “we were broken into different lines.” This excavation of being—not merely selfhood but Being itself—sets the confrontation tone for the collection. If Nothing doesn’t trace a path out of addiction and despair, it holds their gaze, steady and unsparing.

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Though it would not 

bring me any joy at all, I would

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repeat three times the day I did not 

pull the trigger, or the day I almost

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pushed the sharpest knife 

we owned between my ribs.

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— from “For What It’s Worth”

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These are poems that refuse the safety of euphemism. Nienow’s language is strikingly tactile. We encounter knives, ropes, ash, wire, glass, fire. In “Every Gift Carries a Cost,” the speaker handles a knife inherited from his  grandfather — it becomes more than heirloom; it becomes talisman, ritual object, mirror: 

“I can’t / look at him as I use / his knife, as I smudge / the silver glint / against the heated / glass…”

Even here, in the physicality of tool and gesture, the poem slips toward ache. What is inherited is not just a blade but its double edge: the love it was offered with, and the wounds it is bound to cause. This sensuousness extends to the natural world—trees, rivers, the charged ground underfoot. But the grounding is never passive. “The negative charge of the very ground,” is what allows the body—surging with static grief and trembling wonder—to discharge. Fire appears throughout the book—not only as symbol, but as a crucible. It destroys as it purifies (or purifies as it destroys?). The earth becomes a circuit. Language becomes voltage.

At the heart of the collection is the father-son relationship, haunted by absence. In “They Once Looked to Me” and “Bookending the Day,” the speaker is not simply a parent, but a man gripped by his own failures. Yet there is no performative guilt, no dramatic apology, just an acknowledgment of this terrible, beautiful truth: “Had I been childless, nothing would have called me from the edge.” The line lands without revelation. It registers like an after-action report. The child saves the speaker’s life only in the logistical sense. The crisis remains. It’s folded into the rhythms of making dinner.

And yet, If Nothing is not a book of salvation. Its brilliance lies in its refusal to offer easy redemption. In “Getting Off Antidepressants,” Nienow captures the slippage between dream and waking, between the hope for meaning and its disintegration. “I’d wake drenched in sweat / more alive, it seemed, than I’d ever been.” The clarity of the dream never quite survives the return to consciousness. 

The book returns often to the subject of addiction, but Nienow is not interested in dramatizing it. The poems avoid both confession and recovery narrative. The collection crescendos through philosophical deepening, as opposed to through spectacle. In “Multitudes” and “Repeat After Me,” the body is both vessel and void. “The body goes. It was nothing personal.” It’s a line that resists sentimentality while amplifying the stakes (something Nienow is really fucking good at!). Here, the specter of impermanence is not an excuse for despair but instead a call to attention. Nienow’s engagement with mortality sharpens our sense of life.

Nienow’s lyricism, too, is architectural (and never ornamental). The poems are accessible upon first reading, yet unfold layer by layer upon multiple readings. His language holds weight. It carries grief. It shelters light. Even in the book’s darkest passages, a “little glow” persists. Not triumph or transcendence, but a sense of light, nonetheless. These poems remind me of  Larry Levis and Franz Wright.  Both poets haunt the margins of this book: Levis in its philosophical undercurrent, Wright in its desperate clarity. But Nienow’s voice is his own—less mythic than Levis, less ruinous than Wright—anchored instead in the small, continuous labor of trying to stay. Trying to love. Trying to last.

There are many books that rely on damage to make the language feel urgent. This one does the opposite. The damage is ordinary. The urgency comes from trying to stay with it. In the end, If Nothing is not about obliteration, but about the daily, unglamorous act of survival. It dares to ask what endures after the fall, and its answer, spoken without spectacle but with enormous courage, is this: 

the chance to be new, again and again.

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