“I call the whole blue ache to me, but with the plummet and the tumult of an earth-bound body, I can’t help what I love.”
“Fire Blight”, the second piece featured in Los Angeles-based author Nick Martino’s debut poetic collection “Scrap Book”, serves effectively as a brief yet striking view into the thematic landscape that grips much of the work’s intimate personal narrative. In it, Martino reflects on encountering a childhood orchard now scorched to the ground by a fire he was not around to witness. The orchard’s absence embodies an unsettling truth that centrally underlies the collection: we are born into environments already shaped by forces set in motion long before we arrive. We have no choice but to navigate these places — we can’t help our inheritance of them, nor often our love for them.
Set within a Midwestern family home along the shores of Lake Michigan, “Scrap Book” explores Martino’s navigation of his father’s incarceration and its aftermath in which he was raised. Meshing poetic form with familial memoir, the collection constructs an “autoethnographic study of carceral trauma”, and its reverberations felt across time. Though, this much I could’ve told you by referring you to the book’s landing page — a place I no doubt hope you’ll visit after reading this brief article.
Curious regarding the apparent emotional intensity and deeply personal nature of the subject matter — as well as wanting to know more regarding the work’s inception — I got into contact with Martino to probe his authorial process. During our eventual interview, I asked if there was any separation between his “artistic” and “real” selves — as I wondered if a degree of distance was needed to maintain clarity in writing the pieces. He shared insight accordingly, and answered in a way I didn’t initially expect: “The book as a whole really started to come together in the third year of my MFA program. I’d been writing poems, but was a bit hesitant to describe this carceral history in our family. That changed when my mother fell off a ladder and broke her heel in 13 places. I flew home to Milwaukee to help take care of her, and once there, she shared with me our family cache of nine Polaroid photos of my father in prison on select visitation days. I began to write about these photos; those poems became the Polaroid poems in the collection.
“These poems arose from the condition of the caretaker I was inhabiting at that time. As such, I feel the poems themselves are suffused with this desire to take care and nurture. The ‘me’ taking care of my mother was indispensable to the ‘me’ of the speaker in those poems. I believe that the speaker of my poems — the ‘me’ that isn’t quite me — is tremendously close to who I am out in the real world.”
Following our chat, after reading “Scrap Book” for the second time, it occurred to me that Nick Martino does not primarily reveal himself as a writer and mere speaker. Or, rather, it would be primitive for me to boil him down that way. Nick is an archaeologist, “Scrap Book” his breathing relic. Through it, he unearths and assembles the splintered artefacts of his family’s shared tumult. In the same manner shattered porcelain is recast with gold streaking its imperfections, the fragments of Martino’s familial chronology are joined together poetically by his own tender reflections, and underlying devotion. It is a memoir of struggle in an environment marred by carceral trauma, yet simultaneously an ode to a love laid threadbare, but undeniably potent, and often uncontrollable. He yields his experience and emotion to the reader in sharp ekphrastic bursts; alternating lines teem with contradiction and omission as thoroughly as they do somber detail and frank directness. It all blends together to give each poem a uniquely heavy, raw weight to them, as if you were listening first hand to Martino’s own personal account.
I would be doing “Scrap Book” a severe disservice if I referred to it as simply a collection of poems. Martino has engineered the text’s very form such that it defies the confines of its page. True to its title, “Scrap Book” is a masterful exercise in collage — a richly woven tapestry, strung together with various threads, running from excerpts of handwriting from his mother’s own journal, to polaroids from visits to his father in prison, to a slew of vivid instances of memory, so thoroughly drenched with sharp imagery you can practically feel his words tangible between your fingers. Beyond its intense emotional content and introspective verse, “Scrap Book” is a sharp example in form-innovation. His experimentation reaches its zenith in his “Polaroid” poems, wherein across multiple pages he textually outlines the visualization of a polaroid photo, word by word, each page’s combination forming a novel, unique poem until they all conjoin to reveal a singular, stark image; the poem’s gradual, staggered inception mirrors the process of a photo’s development in the chemical baths of a darkroom. In other sections, he grafts his mother’s handwriting directly into the poem — or he paints it in giant, enveloping scrawls across the page, growing to eventually plunge the poetic text itself into darkness.
Needless to say, Martino has illuminated for me that not only the words of poetry, but their spaces, the pages they lie on, and the source materials from which their inspiration is drawn are all as effectively potent in transmitting meaning as the words themselves. Not only are they potent, but necessary, as for Martino, gaps speak as loudly as phrase — blank space, interruption, and ambiguity carry with them significance equal to the tangible substance that lies between. In the same interview, I asked him if he could share insight into the process that drove the work’s distinctive formal qualities, and to my immense surprise, he claimed it was pure exploration: “I’m also a total design and visual art novice […] It was fun to embrace something I know nothing about, alongside something I know a little more about to see what would come up. I think that contemporary poetry will continue to innovate itself in this way, pushing the medium to consider just what constitutes poetry and how we consume it.”
In short, I’ve walked away from “Scrap Book” with a profoundly renewed understanding of what’s possible in manipulating the very form of poetry — manipulation that presents an intense interiority in a moving way. I believe “Scrap Book” is an experiment imbued with an exceptional sense of emotion; a work shaped equally from shared love and strife alike, as well as an unarguably expert level of poetic artistry. If this debut is representative of what’s more to come from Martino’s print, I believe, and hope, that we are in store for many more exceptional projects in the future.
