Featured by Poets and Writers' "Page One"

"…'This world expects a man/to prove that he exists,' Nienow writes in his second collection, a meditation on masculinity that grapples with alcoholism, recovery and the deep yearning for forgiveness. 'I didn’t know how to be/a friend or father,' one speaker admits."
—New York Times Book Review

"Don’t start Matthew Nienow’s new collection, If Nothing unless you can finish it. These poems, just as captivating as they are devastating, begin in a dark place. With lines strafed with self-reproach, Nienow wrestles with addiction, suicidal depression, and the agony of wanting to be a better father. ... This is an arduous journey very much worth taking."
—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club

"Matthew Nienow’s poetry collection If Nothing is a vivid exploration of addiction and sobriety, marriage and fatherhood. The book is in part about what it means to be good and how we balance cultural expectations of goodness with our personal values. But it’s also about taking accountability when we fail to be good—how, in the process, we can find and give grace and forgiveness."
—Charlotte Fleming, The Rumpus

“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.”

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"If Nothing is a large-hearted and clear-eyed meditation on the obligations of being a man and father, freighted as those subject positions are with sometimes perilous inheritances. ... It is one of the most thoughtfully plotted—or sectioned, or laid out, or arced—collections I have encountered"
—Preposition Magazine

"Matthew Nienow shows us in If Nothing that he is a poet of birth, of making and making anew. He writes, 'All the second chances, what did they teach me, if not to dream more wildly toward a kingdom in which the king was not so cruel?' and then he shows us the stutter step restarting of love after malice, tenderness after neglect. 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."
—Kaveh Akbar

"…If Nothing is a searingly honest account of addiction and remorse. Here are poems of desire, destruction, prayer, and recovery. They are structurally beautiful in cadence and rhyme (i.e. “every mirror an error”) but plainspoken around the most painful admissions: “I had/ been thinking of killing myself.” The balance makes for a hard-won, unforgettable book."
—Erin Malone, Eagle Harbor Book Co. Staff Recommendation

"If Nothing… is driven by hunger: toward sleep, for relief, to return to the past. This second collection feels as sturdy as it does stimulating. Counting sobriety, measuring parenthood, and recalling losses, though at the heart of the book a new world comes from the responsibility of the self: "I was inside with no story / to save me from myself."
—Poetry Northwest

“I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s tender, surprising, uplifting, devastating.”

—Jordan Hamel, Brooklyn Poets

“The poems insist that nothing should be prettified… but many of the poems in If Nothing are downright gorgeous… The sounds… wonderfully echo the dialogue we have witnessed—before our eyes, the poet has become new. I could sense, as I seldom do, a writer solving his own mysteries through poetry itself. I suppose that is what is called healing. All I could do after finishing If Nothing was to read it again, then again.”

—Carla Sarett, New Verse Review

“Nienow’s work is not another sensationalistic glimpse into an addict’s life. It is a retrospective reflection – as tortured as it is elegant, as remorseful as it is hopeful…”

—Pauline Picot, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal

"'Love is showing up so fully it hurts,' Matthew Nienow writes, and indeed he shows up here in full. These are poems of startling vulnerability, poems of addiction and despair and the wake they carve through a marriage, through fatherhood, through a self. But the thing about a wake is that the water comes back together, however changed. If Nothing doesn’t bare loss gratuitously. No, it sees—it sings—loss through to its many lessons. This book makes work of loss, and anyone who reads this poet will come to recognize that work and love go hand in hand."
—Corey Van Landingham

"'I walked straight into the fire and took my place amongst the ash,' writes Matthew Nienow. The result is If Nothing, a bracing collection that digs into the ashes of addiction, marriage, and fatherhood to discover what the tree knows under the carpenter’s chisel, that loss can also be abundance."
—Tomás Q. Morin

"'If you can live with loss, the soul grows bright,' Matthew Nienow writes in this clear-eyed and resonant book. His voice never wavers. Addiction and mental health and shame are rendered in searingly alive language. His vulnerability is radical listening—to masculinity, to loneliness, to family, to betrayal. In these deftly crafted poems, loss shines bright, but grace shines brighter."
—Eduardo C. Corral

"Nienow has articulated a collection of tight, narrative, first-person meditations that offer a purposeful meandering, composing poems that attempt to both place and find himself."
—rob mclennan