Join Milkweed Books and special guests, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Ryan Vine, and Michael Bazzett, as we launch and celebrate Matthew Nienow's newest collection of poetry, If Nothing, out with Alice James Books in January. ABOUT THE BOOK If Nothing confronts addiction, the learned behaviors and expectations of masculinity, fatherhood, and the feelings of guilt and shame, attempting to understand them better and in doing so, find redemption and forgiveness. The poems often call us to listen to ourselves closer and ask, how do we forgive ourselves? This is a book that wants readers to feel their feelings without shame or remorse. The tension between the physical and emotional, like the imagery of crafting with sharp tools in concert with the speaker’s inebriated state, is well-wrought and moves us to feel the precariousness and delicate nature of the speaker’s physical and emotional reality and the vulnerability exposed by the collision of the two. Earnest and vulnerable poems strive toward redemption, understanding, self-awareness, and the possibility of joy. The book feels almost like a second coming-of-age anthem, or one for the “real” coming of age–the one we all experience mid-life when things get real in a new way. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Matthew Nienow’s debut collection, House of Water, was published by Alice James Books in 2016. His poems have appeared in such venues as Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, 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 Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and two sons, where he works as a mental health counselor. Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Minnesota Book Award.​​ Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named a New York Times Best Book of the Year. He is also the author of the chapbook Imaginary City (OW! Arts). His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Best New Poets. A longtime faculty member at The Blake School, Bazzett has received the Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. He lives in Minneapolis. Ryan Vine is the author of The Cave and To Keep Him Hidden, winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the chapbooks WARD and Distant Engines, winner of a Weldon Kees Award. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. His honors include the Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Poetry Prize, grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.

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