The End of the Folded Map (Codhill Press, 2011)

Winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award for 2010, The End of the Folded Map charts the jagged frontiers of memory with lines of metrical precision and imagistic inventiveness, rendering an atlas of our collective humanness.”

— Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge

Poems from this collection first appeared in Blackbird, Cincinatti Review, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, The Journal, New England Review, New Madrid, Parcel, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and the digital anthology Two Weeks, put out by the editors of Linebreak.

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The Smallest Working Pieces (Toadlily Press, 2009)

Nienow’s poems are lyrically spare and mysterious, often striking a perfect balance between concrete and abstract, as in the brilliant “String Theory”: “Burnished. Bead. Spotted/ and shining. . . . What could be is only/ a limit of the mind.”

—Cynthia Hogue

“By a remarkable alchemy, these disparate elements merge into a single, compelling unity.”

—Susan Settlemeyer Williams

“In all of these poems one is also reminded of Edward Albee’s idea of going a great distance only to return through a much shorter passage somehow changed, ratified in the work of returning. There is something sober, something taking measure here, and yet there is the wildness of opportunity that language itself bears wonderfully into the poems.”

—Sean Nevin

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Two Sides of the Same Thing (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2007)

“With ‘dark swollen words and shifting air,’ Matthew Nienow builds poems as if building boats, ‘each strip like a tree’s growth,’ and ‘asking the question rivers are always asking: why?’ From Nienow I am grateful to have learned that poetry ‘is movement with one desire: to pull at whatever it touches.’ There is much talk these days of the importance of a poet’s voice. But here we have proof that a poet’s ear… for music, for complexity, for ‘the prodigal aria returning home’…is just as important.”

— Todd Boss

“Matthew Nienow moves like an attentive guide into the wild power of earth and the imagination…. All around him, mouths are poised to tell stories. He listens. The poems that have come of his journey are collective but intimate. While loss unsettles, love reassures. Self-revelation inspires trust as we, too, are called to witness cycles of generation and loss beyond human control.”

—Diane LeBlanc