Poet and educator Nick Martino reads from his debut collection Scrap Book, 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. He'll be joined by fellow poet Ally Ang. 

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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.

Nick Martino is the author of Scrap Book (Alice James Books, 2026), winner of the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award. His poems are published or forthcoming from Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, and The Southern Review, among others. He has received support and fellowships from Sewanee Writers Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Community of Writers. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.

Ally Ang is the author of Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books 2025). A National Endowment for the Arts fellow and MacDowell fellow, Ally’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, The Seattle Met, and elsewhere. They co-host Other People’s Poems, a poetry open mic and reading series in Seattle. Find them at allysonang.com or @TheOceanIsGay.