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The Committee of Men
James Ciano
Boa Editions (2026)
99 pp. $19 (paperback)

If Nothing
Matthew Nienow
Alice James Books (2025)
100 pp. $24.95 (paperback)

James Ciano: I’m so struck by the book’s beautiful design, specifically the way the cover image reappears as the divider between the book’s five sections. For a collection that charts a life’s journey from absence to presence, it’s amazing to watch you and your son steadily recompose fully back into the picture with each section break. Could you talk about this thoughtful design and how you landed upon it?


Matthew Nienow: The book’s final design has become essential to the way I relate to and experience these poems, but this came about very late in the publishing process. I had originally proposed a handful of paintings to the press, but they weren’t able to acquire their top pick. During this time of waiting, I kept recalling this image of my older son and me from many years back. It kind of haunted me, and I sensed it could be the perfect cover image, though I wasn’t totally convinced I was right to pair it with these poems. The press liked the idea, and I was very fortunate that book designer Tiani Kennedy saw its potential. She offered several ideas for the soft section breaks, one of which was the progressively exposed polaroid. This visual element, largely due to the strikingly personal photo, helped the book rise into full coherence. I’m grateful for the work of collaboration that made this book something I can also wonder at from the outside.


MN: Speaking of book design, I was really moved to learn that your wife, who is an incredible poet in her own right, created the cover art for your book. Can you talk a bit about what this process was like for the two of you? How does it feel to share the collection in this way?


JC: Prior to her life as a poet and essayist, my wife Victoria Kornick was a serious visual artist. There’s a poem in the book titled “The Committee of Men (Art)” that is based off a ballpoint drawing by Giacometti. I had always been drawn to Giacometti’s incredibly gestural and frenetic drawings of heads and faces. When it was clear that the rights to his work would be a nonstarter, I approached my wife about the possibility of doing an original image for the cover. My process included sharing with her not only the Giacometti drawings I loved, but also early drawings by Michelangelo of bodies, limbs, and torsos; the tortured figures of Tracey Emin; the pastels of Joan Mitchell. I also created for her a playlist of songs that, via sound, embraced the kind of arranged derangement I was visually drawn to. We watched a clip from the 1986 Leos Carax film Mauvais Sang, in which an exalted Denis Levant runs down a street in Paris to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” with such life-force it seems like his chest might rip apart.

From there, she tried several approaches with different materials: oil pastel, charcoal, ink. Ultimately, we landed on a series of blind contour drawings she completed of my face. These line drawings, in which the artist never looks down at the paper and never lifts the pen, possessed a tension between unity and fragmentation, focus and movement. And the representation of my face (and the many versions of it) was both figurative and distorted, and spoke to the collection’s titular “committee” but also the self’s many masks.

We share a life, a child, a home. She has been with me through every iteration of the book and every iteration of myself. To share the book in this way feels merely like an extension of our life’s partnership.


JC: I have been thinking a lot about the title of your collection, If Nothing, and the conditional. In terms of the architecture of the collection, it’s amazing how you close the book with the poem titled “And Then,” thus completing the logic of the if/then statement. That “nothing” of the book’s title feels multivalent to me though. In one sense, I read it in a self-castigatory way, like If I am nothing. But at the same time, as the speaker journeys from absence to presence and out of the hazy nothingness of a “dusk that seems somehow endless,” the “nothing” transforms. The habituated behaviors of addiction are gone such that the speaker, like in the poem “The Return,” can find a way back to himself, and in a poem like “Cocoon,” the “nothing,” rather than an endless unbreakable loop, becomes a space of newness and possibility.


MN: I relate to the title in a similar way. When I landed on that title some years into making these poems, it felt like a knife—cutting and dangerous. Over time, it also came to feel somehow softer too. Its incomplete gesture allowed me to lean into greater complexity while looking closely at a painful past from a much healthier present.


MN: Many poems in The Committee of Men display a potent tension between physical violence and tenderness between boys and men. Most interesting is the proximity between these two states, as though displays of tenderness between boys and men only become possible in the immediate aftermath of injury, as though aggression were the only door to this kind of intimacy. As a male poet with a background as a high-level athlete, I’m curious about your relationship to this paradigm of American masculinity. On one hand, the narrative elements of your poems suggest you have, in part, lived within the more narrow constraints of this kind of performative masculinity, and yet the fact of your role as a poet suggests a greater access to a broader emotional landscape. How do you conceptualize your personal experience within and outside of these cultural norms?


JC: For much of my life, I operated almost exclusively inside the pervasive conventions and narrow constraints of a culturally normative sense of masculinity. In fact, the prevailing climate of my adolescence and young adulthood was defined and shaped by these conventions. Not only was I a high-level athlete in high school, but athletics was pretty much all I knew until about the age of seventeen. Both my father and mother were physical education teachers. As were both of my grandfathers. My father coached high school football, basketball, and baseball, and much of the way I related to my family, to others, and myself was through athletic performance. The performance of masculinity is exhausting—it erodes the soul. The harder one performs, the emptier one feels. And yet, it’s incredibly difficult to exist outside of these conventions when your identity as an athlete is so inextricably tied to them. For years, it was torturous. I claim no special relationship to this experience, and in fact, I think it’s one many athletes with a heart or a conscience eventually go through. A reader may find this all laughable, which it is. But I’ve watched young men, boys, including myself, get slowly eaten away at by its systemic cruelties.

Violence and tenderness exist inside this negative feedback loop—at some point, most young men are made to feel that tenderness is not an okay emotion to have. For fear of isolation, we participate in the system’s economy. In denying emotion, we turn to aggression. In the wake of such aggression, we feel raw, tender, something like, dare I say, intimacy. We feel something. Simultaneously, we also feel shame at having felt. In order to escape the shame, we participate in the system’s economy again, ad infinitum.

I’m not all that interested in grown men crying at baseball games or sports as a surrogate emotional reality for emotionally illiterate men. But I am interested in how masculinity at its most performative (the world of high-level sports) is also the space in which I have felt the most physical and emotional intimacy with other men. In almost no other space would it have been deemed acceptable for me to cry, shirtless, holding another man.

I’m not a scholar of masculinity and much of what I’m saying is probably rudimentary thinking in the world of gender theory and psychology. But the conventions of masculinity are so insidious and pervasive, even the most-worked-on version of myself (the one typing this answer) is constantly fighting back against this kind of rot. We are taught the ways at such a young and impressionable stage in our development that the impacts are deep and have had decades to set in our psyches. To undo the harm requires constant questioning and disentanglement, even for those who are already self-aware.


JC: Building on some of what we’ve been thinking about, I’m really curious about an imagistic vocabulary in your work that feels like it both gestures to and complicates these deeply American conventions: I’m thinking here of something like recurrences of “knife” imagery, but also gestures to deeds, contracts, property, and a deep sense of Emersonian self-reliance. I’m thinking here of poems like “It Could Be That My Heart Was Not In It,” or “Alternate Endings” too, which contain a more explicit engagement to notions of “wealth” or “providership.” How did you arrive at this language? Does it at all come out of your previous work as a small-business owner and boat builder? And how does it relate to “debt” in the sense of forgiveness and recovery?


MN: In a broader sense, I know part of the deep sense of shame I carried for many years, both within active addiction and the early years of sobriety, had a great deal to do with societal expectations of providership most classically placed upon husbands and fathers. I could build a beautiful, useful thing with my hands, but there were years when I could barely contribute to paying the bills. And so, while I lean into gratitude on a daily basis for all the amazing parts of my life, I also carry a clear sense that I was never owed anything. Had I not had the supports in my life (namely, loving parents and a stubborn, resilient, and generous partner), I imagine my life could have gone in all sorts of directions, as imagined in “Alternate Endings.”

The language of deeds and property arrives as a way to call out how ridiculous it is to think we can own anything, and simultaneously to make clearer what it means to take actual responsibility for the parts of life we are inherently accountable to.


JC: And speaking of Emerson, and Whitman for that matter (I’m thinking of “Multitudes”), the natural world is a significant part of this book. Obviously, the metaphor of the “Cocoon” becomes central to the rebirth of our speaker. But as the book progresses from the haze of addiction to the honest work of sobriety, the speaker’s relationship to the natural world shifts as well. Where once the natural world was embodied by the “bitter floral notes / of hops” and the “daily homage // to the excess of nature / the overkill of spring,” the speaker eventually is able to see himself as the “saved bird” in a poem like “History” and moves through the landscapes of home in poems like “Pastoral,” “If You think You Know The Way,” and “Someday, If I am Lucky” with a kind of ecstatic and, to borrow your word, “alchemical” gratitude. Even that subtle linguistic shift from the “chemical dose” in an early poem, “Every Gift Carries a Cost,” to the “alchemical twilight” in “Letter of Recommendation” feels incredibly important. How do you see the natural world functioning in this book, and do you at all think of yourself as a poet of “place”?


MN: Maybe I’ll disagree with myself later, but I think all poets are formed and informed by the places in which we come to know ourselves and move through and look back on. Some poets don’t write so explicitly about these places, but I believe they are woven into the fabric of regional phrasings and thought forms. In the case of the many poems in this last book that feature the landscape(s) of my home, this was largely due to the fact that in the process of getting sober, and for many of the early years in this chapter, I was largely homebound. I stopped going out and wandered the few acres of woods and meadow lonelier than I’ve ever been. There were more and more exceptions over time, but I couldn’t escape (nor did I totally want to) the immediate surroundings where I worked through guilt, shame, and grief into a deeper and lasting health. The place was a part of this work and this transformation. Naming it, for me, feels somehow inescapable.


MN: Speaking of challenging times, I’m drawn to a quality of emotional vulnerability in several of the poems in The Committee of Men that reference depression, sadness, suicidality, and periods of struggle that many men still find difficult to talk about. When I first read some of these poems, I noticed the recurring proximity between serious, emotional weight with something lighter and more playful (“The saddest time in my life / was also the time I had the worst haircut…”), as if talking about depression might be too uncomfortable, or just taboo, and couching such divulsions in poems featuring a more playful voice would make it more palatable to readers. In that initial reading, I likened this to the earlier notion that tenderness between men could only be tolerable if paired with violence of some kind. I later came to feel (more accurately, I believe) that these pairings revealed just how dangerous it was, and is, to be so honest about depression and moving through the world, for years, wanting to die.

I wonder if you’d be willing to speak about your experience of divulging these feelings and experiences in poems. You also reveal a brother’s struggle with apparent mental illness (never specifically named) and the emotional distance of your father and, maybe to a lesser extent, your mother. Even so, these revelations come with less of an apparent need to create some layer of distance. What is true for you? There is always the chance I’ve miscast some of these ideas onto your poems.


JC: I think the humor or play that you’re sensing is maybe less to do with making those poems palatable to readers, but more so to make those poems palatable to myself. I wrote many poems that looked at my struggles with mental illness head-on, and though they were important for me to write, they never felt successful as poems. Humor became a way for me to touch something more deeply. Those themes of mental illness, when entered at through the front door, for me always seemed somewhat two-dimensional. Accessing the playful in my work was like entering through the side door or even sneaking in through the window—suddenly that which was flat when faced head-on was now three-dimensional; I had caught it off guard and, in doing so, was able to touch something truer in the poem.

In the poems about other family members, I think the distance is already there. I can look at those relationships or struggles more directly because they aren’t me. My hope though, no matter what or who I’m writing about, is that there’s an unsparing quality to the work, free of judgement or criticism, but hyper-sensitive and attuned to those blemishes and vulnerabilities of our shared humanity.


MN: I’ve noticed a small but growing contingent of male poets more fully embracing roles of active fatherhood, domesticity, and themes of masculinity in ways that directly counter the pervasive and problematic bro culture of the manosphere. While I’m not surprised that poets seem to be leading, I’m curious to hear how you relate to this era of reckoning and which particular poets and books you look to in this growing canon.


JC: I’d say I’m really heartened. Though he isn’t in the poems of this book, the making of my son and the making of the book feel deeply entwined. And in many ways, having a son made me return to the work with a greater moral imperative. Connecting with you has been a blessing, so too our shared friend, the poet Bobby Elliott.

As I see a generation of young men slowly indoctrinated by the worst kind of masculine ideology, I also see shows like Adolescence and an increased willingness to have public conversations about toxic masculinity and its deleterious effects. My hope for the book is that someone reading it might find their own way to reckoning and the beautiful aftermath of growth and self-forgiveness.



JAMES CIANO is the author of The Committee of Men (Boa Editions, 2026), and an associate editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf, 2026). He holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. Recent poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, The Hopkins Review, and The Yale Review. His reviews and writings on poetry have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the 2025–2027 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University, and lives in Decatur, GA.


MATTHEW NIENOW’s latest collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), was recommended by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, WA, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.