Scrap Book (Alice James Award - Editor's Choice) [9781949944792]

Overview

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.