Imagination as Reconstructive Lens: Nick Martino’s SCRAP BOOK
- 23 hours ago
- 6 min read
Nick Martino
Scrap Book
Alice James Books / 2026 / 92 pp / $21.95 Paperback
Reviewed by James Long, July 2026
Imagine being handed a set of photographs from before you were born, Polaroids documenting your parents facing a trauma that would come to shape your own life. As Nick Martino reveals on the page of his website dedicated to Scrap Book, this is exactly where his debut poetry collection began.
Scrap Book is Martino’s attempt to reckon with a past fractured by his father’s imprisonment and its rippling aftermath. Quoting Marianne Hirsch, a professor at Columbia University, the book’s cover notes suggest Martino’s experiences spring from “postmemory,” a condition she defines as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply.” Scrap Book employs compelling narrative-lyric structures, surprising natural-world imagery and jarring invented forms to construct an assemblage of such fragmented memories —an actual “scrapbook” of sorts that includes journal snippets in their original script and ekphrastic poems based on the very Polaroids that sparked the book. It’s an essential and necessary work, as much for its innovative form as for its sharp, explorative content.
It seems strange to discuss a collection of such lyric intensity as Scrap Book in terms of its narrative structure. And yet mastery of the story element is a strength of so many lyric poets, Martino among them. The collection follows a loose narrative arc from childhood memory flashes showing the family’s turmoil to adult reflections grappling with acceptance of that past. He sets up the book’s mother-father-son dynamic in “My Mother Was the Cornfield,” in the book’s third poem. It begins,
From her, I inherit the soft armor
absence makes.
See: the road map
she stashes deep in the glovebox
beside the Polaroids of my father
and her journal: for when I need time
alone.
This at once addresses the father’s prison sentence and prefigures the speaker’s and, interestingly, also the mother’s defense against family trauma: withdrawal, which also manifests as drug abuse. At about its midpoint, the book turns more toward a process of understanding, or even accepting, the past. I notice this first with “Torso,” which relates receiving a mailed container gardening kit and opening it with a “boning knife” to a remembered experience where the father teaches the speaker to field dress a fallen animal (the presumption here is at some point they hunted together): “What little I can fix / comes with directions: How to assemble / your raised garden bed—.” It seems the “fix” includes planting the garden, as receiving the kit seems to roughly coincide with the speaker’s gradual turn toward reckoning with two important traumas: the prison sentence and his father’s later heart disease. Some of the poems lean more toward complete stories, and this helps maintain narrative footing among others where only snippets are revealed or revisited in a progression which at times feels jumbled as memory itself. Where narrative is stronger, it still serves up intense, lyric moments. “The Road Map,” for instance, toggles between the speaker fleeing a family fight on his father’s bike and images that reflect his intensifying isolation. The poem ends with this gut punch: “Love: I know I can outstare it. / When I get home, I slide back / into the knife block of silence.”
Often Scrap Book’s figurative lens focuses on the natural world. From the book’s second poem, we are led to see the non-human as a sort of epiphanic, talismanic force for which the speaker yearns and which represents a kind of purity. Fire becomes a central image in this theme and functions as a transformative catalyst. The speaker as child witnesses fire’s destructive force alongside the pain that incarceration inflicts on the family in the prose poem “Polaroid: Prison Visit September 7, 1989”:
Baby blue pickup on the horizon, idling, fragile ribbon
of exhaust in the air, the smell of burning leaves. Here, I trace the outline of
what’s lost: my grandmother’s life, the promise of the future, and the barn—
taken by a fire that burned down half the city but left the prison untouched.
As he remembers this event in the early poem “Fireblight,” the speaker proclaims his unity with the natural world and his related determination to find self-renewal, writing, “My heart swivels on its green, wooden stem—.” We see in this line how natural imagery is central to the speaker’s sense of self and survival. The setting for much of Scrap Book is Lake Michigan, and the general image of a lake gradually becomes central to the book as well. He brings us to a clear recognition of this in a move that also feels fresh as the moment of his own recognition of it in “Two Postcards,” reflecting about his mother, “Before I was born, you lived / a whole life. And then I rose out of / the lake of you.” This image fantastically binds mother, son, and natural world in a way that seems almost Arthurian to me. While it does not attempt to literally replicate that story, it does tap into the idea of the lake being a spiritual force of power and renewal. If the fire images could be seen as a sort of purge, the lake images help Martino position his speaker’s quest to find, if not hope, at least understanding as a way forward.
Although it seems to dissipate in roughly the last third of the book, the speaker’s drug use at times blurs the view of that path. In Scrap Book’s opener, “Love Poem,” the speaker dabs and goes on to spend considerable time in the ensuing poems being “stoned as the gargoyles in heaven.” This drug use goes beyond recreation as he hints at experience with pot addiction in “Polaroid: Prison Visit July 7, 1989,” and, in other poems, “From Flower,” and “June,” suggests mother and son are using drugs together. If drug use is a plot line in Scrap Book, it goes unresolved, which I feel should be mentioned, but as other themes take on greater and greater weight, the fizzling out of these references without explanation is ultimately something I can accept as a reader, allowing myself to imagine the abuse as something being worked out in private.
This sense of an idea fading away syncs with what is perhaps Scrap Book’s most striking feature: its use of form, especially Martino’s invented Polaroid concrete/ekphrastic poems. These are essentially prose poems with justified margins fully inside a box outline, and the visual effect of this, combined with the word “Polaroid” in each title, is enough to make the reader imagine an actual photograph. Each of these “Polaroid: Prison Visit” poems is preceded by one or more found poems created from that full prose poem’s text. Together, the pieces function as short series poems where the full, original version is gradually revealed. These poems—there are eight of them interspersed throughout Scrap Book, anchoring it almost as section breaks might—are Martino’s response to the actual Polaroids he was given (the website does not say by whom) documenting one year of his father’s incarceration. The way they slowly reveal a complete picture mimics the actual way photos develop and the emotional way we process our understanding of the past. It is a brilliant move that fits this book perfectly from a thematic perspective. Scrap Book is interspersed quite frequently with other explorations in form, including an incomplete series in the father’s voice that mimics a crown with a few of its sonnets missing. Others appear as fragments in script. It’s alluded to in the cover notes, and Martino explains further on his website that these are excerpts from his mother’s journals kept during the time of his father’s imprisonment. I’ll admit they were more challenging for me to assimilate until I discovered his comments on creating the book (readers may wish to view these on his website). Another formal experiment I came to appreciate more on subsequent readings, called “QVC,” offers a table with 170 possible words to be filled into a poem with blanks. This was a key moment when I felt Martino invited me as reader to enter the book’s conversation with my own experiences and imagination. Although I was less enthused about making my own poem, I appreciated the gesture.
Perhaps Scrap Book’s strongest move is how it invites such imaginative engagement. Quite often there are gaps a reader must explore and imagine. As the speaker suggests in one poem toward the end, this is what he has offered himself and his family. In the last “Polaroid” poem he writes, to the parents, “I give you my imagination: what you gave to me.” Ultimately, through imagination’s power, what Scrap Book really offers is love. Read this book.
James Long’s poems have appeared in regional and national literary journals such as Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, I-70 Review, and Gulfstream. Road to the Stars, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky in 2027. Long’s Substack essay series Born to Listen (@jameslongpoet) explores the stories around discovering new music and poetry. He lives, writes, and teaches in Charleston, West Virginia.