Matthew Nienow’s poetry collection If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025) 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.
Nienow is a singer and songwriter as well as a poet, and there’s a musical quality to the rhythm of his writing. He also spent many years as a builder of wooden boats, and the precision of his language reflects his command of this craft. This specificity of language is especially important with the difficult subjects that Nienow writes about. Many of these poems are, in part, his sober reflections on his time as an addict. As such, he brings himself back to raw moments of pain that require strength to revisit. The writing reflects the emotional toll taken to pull these memories back and describe the agony he was often enduring.
Nienow’s writing embodies honesty and healing. Like his work, Nienow was unflinching during our conversation, willing to explore the full breadth of his experiences, approaching my questions with complete openness and deep reflection. We spoke over Zoom about pleasure-seeking, facing shame, and the slow catharsis he experienced writing the book.
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The Rumpus: I love the nonchronological composition of the book, and I feel like a lot of these poems were able to relay this fractured sense of time. How did you choose to order the poems?
Matthew Nienow: When I’m dealing with really difficult, vulnerable, painful subjects, I want the poems to reflect the lived experience, which is messy. I wanted that messiness of addiction early on in the book. But I knew that that wasn’t the whole book.
I’ve been sober for going on, I think, eight years. It’s hard for me to keep track at this point. But there’s still stuff that I’m living with day to day. There’s still guilt and trying to make things right where I caused harm in the past. There was a long, slow process of feeling into where the poems work together and not necessarily a destination to arrive at—movement towards some form of transformation that isn’t linear.
Rumpus: I really loved the way we’re given different realities in this book. We hear about a reality that was distorted by different substances with the knowledge that it is being written about with all the presence that comes from being sober. I was especially moved by how you wrote about remorse in the poem “Regret.” Were you revisiting past feelings to create these poems? Or had you been sitting with these feelings and needing an outlet for them?
Nienow: I think that’s a great question. There’s a little bit of both, but actually a lot more of the former in my writing practice. I’m a little bit off my game right now, but I was up at four thirty or five every morning and drafting every day for multiple years to make this book. I would go back into those feelings because that’s what I needed to do. To heal and change and grow was to face as much as possible really honestly. In this book, I’m committed to and interested in this kind of deep accountability and honesty. It started with my own personal need. Then, I thought to do any of it justice in the book, I really did need to go back again and again into these places. The shame and guilt, when I go back in and look at it closely, is still there. It doesn’t just go away even if the majority of my life doesn’t resemble anything like it used to.
Rumpus: There’s definitely a hopeful note in the book. I especially loved the line, “I took off my shame / like a dress / made of light.” Was there something cathartic that resembled taking off shame in creating the collection?
Nienow: Yeah, and it was a slow catharsis because there were years where I was working on these poems and doubting them and doubting everything. I was sending out early drafts and getting tons and tons of rejection. This is my second book, so I’d been through some of this earlier, but it almost felt like starting over entirely. It didn’t matter that I’d done it before. And yet—like the lived day—even in really hard times, there would still be wonder, there would still be appreciation, there would still be love. But there was a lot of reckoning with the damage that I caused in my family and in my life. I was called to face things honestly. I’m interested in what it means to share that with other people because I don’t think that we have good public conversations about accountability. Especially for men, this idea of vulnerability is still a big need. So, I’m committed to that partly because it’s important to me but also because I see that need. And I’m a father of boys.
That line that you mentioned was actually from the last poem that I wrote. I don’t totally know where it came from. It’s one of those where, when I look back, it’s not clear to me. I’m interested in transformation rather than redemption. There’s this idea of “to be new,” which, to me, is still a marvel. It’s like, “Whoa, is that even possible?” And I try to live toward it. But yeah, it’s complex. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it is actually possible to do.
Rumpus: I thought that the last line of the book was a perfect end to the collection: “I had forgotten / how new / anyone forgiven / can become.” I saw online that you said this poem was written for your wife. There’s something circular about giving her poems about what she’s given you. A lot of these poems felt like they were telling a love story, if not in the traditional sense.
Nienow: My wife led the way for this idea of “You can be new. Let’s be new now.” It was a lot of hard work, a lot of years being in the muck when it wasn’t easy to be there.
I used to share almost everything I wrote with my wife for years and years. And with this book, I haven’t shared a lot of the poems with her. Even though so much is for her, there’s this fear of sharing it with the people that I’m closest to—partly because it brings back that past, and it’s lived again. There’s a lot of pain there, but it’s true.
Rumpus: There’s such variation in form from poem to poem in this collection. But throughout, there’s a music and lyricism to your work. What’s it like for you when you’re drafting line by line?
Nienow: It’s varied over time. I’ve been writing seriously for about twenty years now and it’s moved through different stages, but one of the things you mentioned is that music, and I definitely am a poet of the ear. The sounds often call to me and lead the way, sometimes more than logic or image. The sound of the language as a texture that’s something physical and muscular has to be right. It has to sound real and true and somehow surprising. What’s interesting to me is, even though there are different forms in this book, I wrote a lot of couplets. I don’t totally know what that was about, but I was drawn to them again and again and again.
Drafting, for me, isn’t just one thing. The entry is sometimes similar. It’s a little hook or a phrase or an idea that comes in. After that, it’s an effort to get something out. And the revising feels effortful, but also, once I’m inside of something I’m interested in, it’s a lot more possible to stay with it and hone it. Most of the book was written super early in the day. I’d be right out of bed, still waking up, kind of halfway between a dream and waking, and then be drafting. I spent a lot of time revising and rereading and tinkering. So, what has stayed and become part of this book, I spent a lot of time with.
Rumpus: I read that you are also a musician and woodworker. Is there a common thread for you between working with your hands to create something with wood or a musical instrument and writing poems?
Nienow: I think the creative thread is similar—the impulse to do something that’s interesting. If I’m making something out of wood, it’s still kind of like imagining it before trying to go about figuring out how to do it. For me, I think it’s that curiosity and wonder that makes that kind of thing interesting.
It is different how I go about it in the shop working with wood. When I’m in the shop working with wood, I have to really consider the process of how I’m going to be able to pull something off. There’s revision and play there, too, but it’s a different thing.
With music, it’s actually closer to what I do in poems, where I try to find my way. With poems, I often start by reading, to get myself into that mind space until something just kind of arrives. And with music, I’m often on my guitar and playing until something kind of arrives. But then I have to ask myself, “Am I just doing this because I want to have this experience right now? Or am I doing something that I hopefully want to share?” And if I want to share it, then I have to remind myself to bring that energy. It’s the same if I’m singing. I could just sing, but if I put some sort of presence and effort into it, then I’m like, “Oh, I can make that sound closer to what I actually want.” I do that in a similar way with poems. I can’t really be asleep and do something new.
Rumpus: You’re writing from a sober place but putting yourself back in the mindset of being drunk or high and having your reality altered by that substance. What was that process of recollection like? What did it feel like to be sober while describing how those worlds felt?
Nienow: A lot of that feels so far away now that it’s harder and harder to do. The bulk of these poems were already mostly finished at least three years ago, if not earlier. The closer I was to having been in that lived addiction, the easier it was to access. Now, it feels like I can talk about it intellectually and recall details and facts.
It feels painful in a strange way to try to force myself back into that at this point. It doesn’t feel as authentic. True healing had to be getting close to the thing. It wasn’t just “I’m not like that anymore. I’m not doing that anymore. Let’s move on.” That’s just kind of shoving something in the past and pretending that that’s enough. For me, that wasn’t enough. I think working to go back in and create that world again on the page was essential for me as a person. And it was something I was committed to as a poet. But it’s not easy. And sometimes I failed. I’ve probably failed more times than I was successful in it. In the book, there are a smaller number of poems in that active addiction space than there are in the time post-addiction because I was in that time, and it was something that felt more authentic.
Rumpus: In this book, the word “good” often comes up. In the first poem, there’s the line, “good / before you knew any other way to be.” And, later on in the collection, you write, “all / the good that glows beyond / your sin” and “I do not / deserve this / chance to be good.” Does it feel like these different moments of “good” are in conversation with each other?
Nienow: That’s the interesting side of hearing what other people pick up. I wasn’t necessarily aware of that. For me, it’s directly connected to the shame that comes up in all this. I think anyone’s experience of shame often is the opposite of good. I personally grew up in a family and family culture where the expectation to be good was very strong. That meant to be kind, to be polite, to be hard working—all that kind of stuff.
I often felt like I could do that on the surface, but for many, many years, active addiction was hidden under the surface. And so, I think facing the shame directly meant also really looking at the other side of it: the longing to be seen and known and to actually feel good about myself. With that first poem you mentioned, I was thinking about what happens when we start doing things that are out of alignment with our values or making mistakes. How does that compromise our sense of inherent goodness or the kind of goodness we try to live towards?
Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about the poem “It Could Have Been Otherwise.” That poem is so deeply rooted in pleasure. Pleasure is a positive thing, but so often, pleasure-seeking can become intertwined with addiction. It feels like the speaker in these poems is very aware of the darker underside of seeking pleasure, yet there were still moments of it feeling good. Can you tell me about the choice to write a poem set within some of these complicated themes?
Nienow: I really feel like you’re right at the center of the complexity of a lot of the poems, which is that there may be positive elements in the way we relate to those good things. How we pursue becoming controlled by them can be negative. A lot of people can drink in moderation, and it can be a positive thing for them. I couldn’t. A poem like that is trying to be honest about something that isn’t just one-sided. It’s authentically complex.
Some of those poems feel so raw and vulnerable when they start to get close to this sense of wanting things that maybe we shouldn’t want. But there are also poems of wonder. Along the way, there may be remorse and regret alongside things that are simultaneously enjoyable or pleasurable or valuable. It would be less honest to try to just make it bad or good. I think it’s a dance.
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Author photograph by River Nienow
