If Nothing receives starred review from Publishers Weekly
“Nienow’s introspective sophomore collection (after House of Water) explores emptiness, desire, and the search for meaning… Unflinching and tender, this volume affirms Nienow’s distinctive poetic gifts.”
Read the full review here.
Devin Kelly reviews and reflects on Poems from If Nothing
Lovely, isn’t it? How a poet can exist in conversation with their own poems? How one poem can talk to another, like entering — one night — into a dream you had the previous night. Like returning to a house you built entirely in your mind, opening the door, and finding you left the window open in a room you realized you once set foot in, long ago.
To be surprised by yourself; to find yourself talking to yourself as if you were your own old friend — this, too, is poetry.
Read the rest on Kelly’s Substack, Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse
Selected for the 2024 GET THE WORD OUT PUBLICITY INCUBATOR
Poets & Writers today announced the ten poets (including Matthew Nienow) who have been selected to participate in Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Read the news here.
Interview at Only Poems
“It really matters to me to be engaged in the honest accounting of addiction. I don’t think we (at least in Western cultures) are very good at that. There is stigma and taboo on one hand, and a simultaneous encouragement/acceptance of patterns of addiction, whether it is in alcohol, food, sex, the internet, etc.”
(Read the rest here.)
Review at 32 Poems
Many thanks to Matt Miller for his generous reading of House of Water at 32 Poems. You can read the full review here.
"House of Water is a book of tender strength that flies beautifully in the puffing face of toxic masculinity that pervades the world today."
review in Orion
"What's so refreshing about Nienow's poems—what actually refreshes the tradition he works within—is the ubiquitous and musical language from the trade itself: sponsons, pry bars, slide hammers, plumb bobs and C-clamps, riving knives, ballast keels and belt sanders, steam boxes and hand planes—all these and more appear unassumingly in poem after poem, providing texture and authority."
(Read the whole review here.)
Review in Tupelo Quarterly
"House of Water [....] is an important and moving accomplishment..."
(Read the whole review here.)
Review in Superstition Review
"Built in to each of the poems in House of Water is a commitment to the physical world. Readers cannot escape the smell of seawater, the heat of fire, the shavings of wood beneath their feet, the laughter of children, or the rock of a boat.
(Read the whole review here.)
POETRY Magazine Podcast
It was a true honor to have Poetry editors, Christian Wiman and Don Share discuss a couple of my poems first presented in the January 2013 issue. Though I recommend listening to the podcast in its entirety, you can hear them chime in about me, here, starting around minute 12:40: