Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **_Scrap Book,_** **the debut collection from Nick Martino, is a lyric, hybrid exploration of his father's prison sentence and its aftermath--an inherited history marked by silence, fracture, shame, and addiction. Weaving poems with invented forms, familial documents, and fragmented memory, Martino constructs an autoethnographic study of carceral trauma and its reverberations across generations.** Set within a Midwestern family home along the shores of Lake Michigan, _Scrap Book_ draws on Marianne Hirsch's theory of postmemory: "the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply." Interwoven with poems grounded in a familial archive--such as journal entries and Polaroids of Martino's father in prison--the collection uses the idea of photographic development as a framework for exploring how insight into family history can emerge gradually, like an image appearing in a darkroom. Through its use of ekphrasis and archival fragments, _Scrap Book_ creates a textural interior landscape in which the speaker wrestles with how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. Ultimately, _Scrap Book_ is a work of gathering and repair--a lyrical stitching-together of fragments in search of meaning. In reassembling the family archive, Martino opens a space for readers to do the same: to sift through memory, injury, and ego, and fashion from their own "scraps" a deeper understanding of what they carry. **Nick Martino** is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee who currently lives in LA. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. **Amanda Maret Scharf** is the author of To Make a Bell Ring Back, winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry (forthcoming, spring 2027) and coauthor of the collaborative chapbooks, Metal House of Cards (Finishing Line Press) and Astral Gaze (dancing girl press, forthcoming). Her poems can be found in Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She teaches at USC and lives in Los Angeles with her wife and their dog, Silver.