If Nothing
About this book
If Nothing is an honest reckoning with the grip of addiction, the expectations of masculinity, and the tug of family.
When mid-life collides with the precariousness of alcoholism, the vulnerability of opening oneself to a second coming-of-age becomes an ecstatic cry in poems that confront pain and the need for forgiveness. An unvarnished and direct accounting of the journey to sobriety, of struggles with mental health, and with the challenges of longing and loss, If Nothing traverses the sting of shame, the earnestness of joy, and the desire for absolution. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, says: "Matthew Nienow shows us in If Nothing that he is a poet of birth, of making and making anew... This is powerful medicine, salve for earnest souls in an era of ethical infantilization. There is grace here, real grace made wise by having known real grief; If Nothing is a lasting book."
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Dedication
- On the Condition of Being Born
- Every Gift Carries a Cost
- Useless Prayer
- What Luck
- Beginner’s Mind
- Dusk Loop
- In Deed
- I Was Almost Always Under
- In the Mirror Looking Back
- Daily Log #104
- Bookending the Day
- Deepwell Traverse
- Cocoon
- At Midlife Trying to Recall My Twenties
- Early Onset
- In the Language of My Kin
- Raison D’être: Night Work
- After the Fire
- Sometime in March 2017
- In All the Wrong Places
- Four Years to the Day
- They Once Looked to Me
- On the Other Side
- Interest Owed
- For Every Part That Shows
- It Could Have Been Otherwise
- I Kiss the Ground Where We Lay
- Regret
- Begin Again
- It Could Be That My Heart Was Not in It
- Make No Mistake
- History
- An Echo for the Archives
- Getting off Antidepressants
- Seams of Starlight & Flecks of Gold
- Ownership
- The Return
- Even If the Past Is Not a Place You Can Visit
- Five Years Now
- Alternate Endings
- Apologia
- No Painting Worth Its Paint
- I Almost Forget
- Ode to ADD
- My Disorder
- Pastoral
- Letter of Recommendation
- If You Think You Know the Way
- Repeat after Me
- The Listener
- Ghazal of Lost Years
- For What It’s Worth
- How to Love the Unfinished Dream
- Someday, If I Am Lucky
- Ghazal of Air
- Multitudes
- Just Across the Wheel from You
- And Then
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