Alice James Welcomes Back Matthew Nienow
Alice James Books is thrilled to announce that it will publish Matthew Nienowβs If Nothing in January 2025.
Nienow is the author of the AJB collection House of Water (2016). His poetry collection, If Nothing, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in January 2025. Welcome, back, Matthew!
Matthew Nienowβs debut collection, House of Water, was published by Alice James Books in 2016. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such venues as 32 Poems, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry. A former Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, he has also received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writersβ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and two sons where he is pursuing a degree in Mental Health Counseling.
FEATURED TITLES
Aldo AmparΓ‘n
"The beautiful strangeness of language and the sobering strangeness of life are braided into lyrical brilliance in Aldo AmparΓ‘nβs second book. Here, what haunts the speaker and the language itself is so startling, so deftly stapled down, I often found myself spellbound. Here, queerness and borders are sites of refusals and consolations. These poems are undeniable and exquisite."
βEduardo Corral, author of Guillotine
"'Men instilled in me /an empty. Iβve grown up/ without a body // of my own.' The traumas and vital reclamations of 'Self-Portrait of the Stolen Body' come midway in AmparΓ‘nβs visceral second collection and its poems full of hauntings, of trauma reflected from the opening loose crown of sonnets filled with closets and candlelit rooms and wounded and severed bodies. ... AmparΓ‘n depicts the brutalities of the world unmitigated by art."
βRebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
September 2026
ISBN: 9781967149001
Also Available via Bookshop.
Nick Martino
The 2024 Alice James Award Editorβs Choice
"Martinoβs debut collection lounges on Lake Michigan beaches, looks out on Milwaukeeβs skyline, and provides readers with myriad ways to enjoy these poems. ... Scrap Book asks what we inherit from our parents, what lies behind a broken relationship, and the meaning of conviction and the handcuff 'chaining us to memory.'"
βAbby McCabe, Booklist Starred Review
"Nick Martino's formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother's journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and incarceration."
βRebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review
June 2026
ISBN: 9781949944792
Also Available on Bookshop.
Mihaela Moscaliuc
"Guggenheim fellow Moscaliuc presents lucid, lithe, and gripping poems about growing up in a Romania besieged by dictatorial tyrannies, intrusive and crushing....The need for secrecy, the valor of helping others, the malignancy of informers, and systemic corruption are all addressed with chilling matter-of-factness. Moscaliucβs lyrical and sensuous palimpsest poems of her life in the U.S. evoke a world in sharp contrast even as the past is hauntingly present."
βDonna Seaman, Booklist
August 2026
ISBN: 9781949944808
Also Available via Bookshop.
Ina Cariño
"Ina Cariño's Reverse Requiem addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming. Working against silence and power and deeply imbued with liberatory politics, the poems are an ode to self, lineage, and love. This work is a triumph."
βCathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost, Split, and An Asian American A to Z: A Childrenβs Guide to Our History
"In their second full-length collection, Whiting Awardβwinner Cariño bends time. Challenging the theory that entropy can only increase, these poems pull ancestors and ghosts known and hidden to the fore, evoking a shared timeline that bends in many directions ... A slim collection that feels much heftier than its page count, this is a luminous work."
βSara Verstynen, ALA Booklist
April 2026
ISBN: 9781949944778
Also Available via Bookshop.
Cole Swensen
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"Swensen's insightfully idiosyncratic prose lyrics connect readers to their surroundings in new and surprising ways, reintroducing things and investing them with a prescient awareness and intelligence."
βLibrary Journal Starred Review
May 2026
ISBN: 9781949944785
Also Available via Bookshop.