Poems in Polaroids: A Review of Scrap Book by Nick Martino
Reviewed by Noel Quiñones
The poems in Nick Martino’s debut collection Scrap Book (Alice James Books, 2026) exist between the thin line of obsession and meditation. True to its name, Scrap Book is a collection of memories, Polaroid poems, and handwritten fragments as a son navigates their father’s imprisonment, mother’s addiction, parent’s divorce, and eventual passing. Through this journey, the son uncovers the fractures that come from obsessively analyzing a relationship from the outside. Martino’s imagery, line breaks, and formal experimentation are striking, but it is his interrogation of an image’s reliability that make this collection utterly captivating. Scrap Book is a reckoning with how we remember those we love when our memories and artifacts lose their reliability with each recollection.
In “My Mother Was the Cornfield,” Martino establishes the son’s inheritance:
From her, I inherit the soft armor
absence makes.
See: the road map
she stashes deep in the glovebox
beside the Polaroids of my father
and her journal: for when I need time
alone.
The speaker’s mother has been made into a contradiction by the father’s absence. She is guarded but still soft, carrying pictures of the father but stashing them “deep.” The glovebox itself is a kind of soft armor, a closed container that travels with her. It is secure but can always be opened. The listing of the Polaroids, journal, and road map together reveals that the speaker is beginning a journey to understanding their parents. The directive “see” adds to this tone of guidance. Similarly, these artifacts require “time / alone” to be engaged with. In this way, Martino establishes a collection where the son has learned to navigate alone, guided by a mother from afar, detached.
This ghostly maternal presence is solidified with handwritten fragments from the mother’s journal interspersed across the entire collection. At first, these fragments act as breaks in the collection, with the first phrase: “feeling alone. Sky is dark. Lake is blue.” on its own page in between poems. The next time we see handwritten fragments they begin on their own page, as if a section break, but then, in a powerfully surprising move, spill into a poem on the next page, titled “The Lake of You.” The handwritten fragments: “Alone in the house. Trying to / get used to it.” and “The one thing I know / I can count on is the Lake— it’s always there.” become interwoven with the typed lines. The title of the poem, “The Lake of You,” is instructive; the handwritten fragments act as water, spilling across the page and into the poem itself. Quite literally, the Lake, referring to Lake Michigan, is “the soft armor / absence makes.” This armor laps softly against the narrative until it strengthens and structures itself in the poems themselves. Yet, its shape stands in contrast to the hard frame of a Polaroid.
In a similarly striking move, Martino utilizes the form of a Polaroid to develop a portrait of the father. There are ten Polaroid poems throughout the collection, eight of them titled “Polaroid: Prison Visit” with dates in italics below each title. Prisons often set up photo stations for inmates to take Polaroids with their visiting family members. While each poem represents a picture of the father and mother when she visits, the square frame is filled with words and consists of 2 to 4 square frames, each developing as a Polaroid does. At first, we see only a few words of the poem as some are lighter / not yet developed, then we get the final poem with all words at the same gradient. Through this poetic form, Martino doesn’t just show us an image of the parents coming into focus, but also how the son develops his own understanding of who his parents are.
The first Polaroid poem, dated June 7, 1989, shows the son fixating on the father’s hand: “his touch / her hand’s grasping / in his / a gesture of / fear.” The son is clear in his belief: his mother is fearful of his father’s touch and so she is holding on firmly to him, as if afraid of the alternative. In the final developed Polaroid the speaker’s interpretation of the hand develops, becoming a “conjugating witness into a judgement / of my father’s distance. And yet I can’t ignore the other hand’s testimony: grasping / her finger in his fist, a gesture of fear indistinguishable from love, or love from fear.” We are watching the son question his own interpretation, moving from a certainty of fear to a grayer area between fear and love. As the Polaroid develops, the parents become indistinguishable, “of her distance” becoming “of my father’s distance.” And in this intertwining, the son cannot discern “love from fear.” What starts as a clear indictment of the father’s touch becomes more nuanced. We are watching the son “conjugating,” translating, deciphering his parent’s relationship in real time.
Across several of the Polaroid poems, which are dated out of chronological order throughout the collection, the son confronts the futility of his obsessive analysis: he is “compelled by the dopamine kick a narrative gives. But as certain details sharpen, memory blunts—the image supplants what I remember,” asks himself “is there a different kind / of evidence here? Can I find the moment his love fell off? I’m looking for the image / to show it to me,” and states “redoubled in her own hand—an hourglass, a handcuff—chaining us to memory.” The son wants the ”dopamine kick” of confirmation, but what initially would be considered “evidence” of divorce is actually a chain, confining the son’s understanding of his parent’s complexity. In the final Polaroid poem, the son asks “Who / took the photograph, and was it me?” The Polaroid comes to represent the very fraught process of memory, how we can force our own narratives onto artifacts from the past, making ourselves the photographer when we were not even present.
What initially the reader would regard as concrete artifacts are reduced, not in importance, but in their ability to speak to the complexity of a human life. Martino carries us from obsession to meditation, from seeing to feeling, as the son learns to break the frame of his father and let the Lake of his mother in. The mother’s voice shifts from a detached presence to a companion in the final poem when the son says, “my head is light / unmoored / to any shape of / home now / what a gift it is / to comb through the house / with you.”
In “My Mother Was the Cornfield,” Martino establishes the son’s inheritance:
From her, I inherit the soft armor
absence makes.
See: the road map
she stashes deep in the glovebox
beside the Polaroids of my father
and her journal: for when I need time
alone.
The speaker’s mother has been made into a contradiction by the father’s absence. She is guarded but still soft, carrying pictures of the father but stashing them “deep.” The glovebox itself is a kind of soft armor, a closed container that travels with her. It is secure but can always be opened. The listing of the Polaroids, journal, and road map together reveals that the speaker is beginning a journey to understanding their parents. The directive “see” adds to this tone of guidance. Similarly, these artifacts require “time / alone” to be engaged with. In this way, Martino establishes a collection where the son has learned to navigate alone, guided by a mother from afar, detached.
This ghostly maternal presence is solidified with handwritten fragments from the mother’s journal interspersed across the entire collection. At first, these fragments act as breaks in the collection, with the first phrase: “feeling alone. Sky is dark. Lake is blue.” on its own page in between poems. The next time we see handwritten fragments they begin on their own page, as if a section break, but then, in a powerfully surprising move, spill into a poem on the next page, titled “The Lake of You.” The handwritten fragments: “Alone in the house. Trying to / get used to it.” and “The one thing I know / I can count on is the Lake— it’s always there.” become interwoven with the typed lines. The title of the poem, “The Lake of You,” is instructive; the handwritten fragments act as water, spilling across the page and into the poem itself. Quite literally, the Lake, referring to Lake Michigan, is “the soft armor / absence makes.” This armor laps softly against the narrative until it strengthens and structures itself in the poems themselves. Yet, its shape stands in contrast to the hard frame of a Polaroid.
In a similarly striking move, Martino utilizes the form of a Polaroid to develop a portrait of the father. There are ten Polaroid poems throughout the collection, eight of them titled “Polaroid: Prison Visit” with dates in italics below each title. Prisons often set up photo stations for inmates to take Polaroids with their visiting family members. While each poem represents a picture of the father and mother when she visits, the square frame is filled with words and consists of 2 to 4 square frames, each developing as a Polaroid does. At first, we see only a few words of the poem as some are lighter / not yet developed, then we get the final poem with all words at the same gradient. Through this poetic form, Martino doesn’t just show us an image of the parents coming into focus, but also how the son develops his own understanding of who his parents are.
The first Polaroid poem, dated June 7, 1989, shows the son fixating on the father’s hand: “his touch / her hand’s grasping / in his / a gesture of / fear.” The son is clear in his belief: his mother is fearful of his father’s touch and so she is holding on firmly to him, as if afraid of the alternative. In the final developed Polaroid the speaker’s interpretation of the hand develops, becoming a “conjugating witness into a judgement / of my father’s distance. And yet I can’t ignore the other hand’s testimony: grasping / her finger in his fist, a gesture of fear indistinguishable from love, or love from fear.” We are watching the son question his own interpretation, moving from a certainty of fear to a grayer area between fear and love. As the Polaroid develops, the parents become indistinguishable, “of her distance” becoming “of my father’s distance.” And in this intertwining, the son cannot discern “love from fear.” What starts as a clear indictment of the father’s touch becomes more nuanced. We are watching the son “conjugating,” translating, deciphering his parent’s relationship in real time.
Across several of the Polaroid poems, which are dated out of chronological order throughout the collection, the son confronts the futility of his obsessive analysis: he is “compelled by the dopamine kick a narrative gives. But as certain details sharpen, memory blunts—the image supplants what I remember,” asks himself “is there a different kind / of evidence here? Can I find the moment his love fell off? I’m looking for the image / to show it to me,” and states “redoubled in her own hand—an hourglass, a handcuff—chaining us to memory.” The son wants the ”dopamine kick” of confirmation, but what initially would be considered “evidence” of divorce is actually a chain, confining the son’s understanding of his parent’s complexity. In the final Polaroid poem, the son asks “Who / took the photograph, and was it me?” The Polaroid comes to represent the very fraught process of memory, how we can force our own narratives onto artifacts from the past, making ourselves the photographer when we were not even present.
What initially the reader would regard as concrete artifacts are reduced, not in importance, but in their ability to speak to the complexity of a human life. Martino carries us from obsession to meditation, from seeing to feeling, as the son learns to break the frame of his father and let the Lake of his mother in. The mother’s voice shifts from a detached presence to a companion in the final poem when the son says, “my head is light / unmoored / to any shape of / home now / what a gift it is / to comb through the house / with you.”
Noel Quiñones is a Puerto Rican writer, educator, and community organizer from the Bronx. He’s received fellowships from Poets House, the Poetry Foundation, CantoMundo, Tin House, and SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts). His work has been published in POETRY, the Latin American Review, Kweli Journal, and is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly and Gulf Coast. He is the founder of Project X, a Bronx-based arts organization, a poetry book reviewer for Muzzle Magazine, and a current M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. Follow him online @noelpquinones.