Tapping Out
Triquartely, 2020
The relentless motions and blinding colors of lucha libre, the high-flying wrestling sport, are the arresting backdrop to Nandi Comer’s collection Tapping Out. Mexican freestyle wrestling becomes the poet’s lyrical motif, uncovering what is behind the intricate masks we wear in society and our search for place within our personal histories. Comer’s poetic narratives include explorations of violence, trauma, and identity. The exquisite complications of the black experience in settled and unsettled spaces propel her linear explorations, which challenge the idea of metaphor and cadence.
The harsh realities of being migrant and immigrant, being birthright and oppressed, are as hard-pressed as the plancha move to the body. Each poem in Tapping Out is a “freestyle movement” of language and complexity put on full display, under the bright lights and roars of survival. Comer’s splendid and barbed, Detroit style of language melts the masks with searing words.
American Family:
A Syndrome
Finishing Line Press, 2018
In Nandi Comer’s “American Family Syndrome: A Singing Skin Disorder,” the poet says the sound coming from a person’s skin is an “auditory / pheromone or territorial / marking made by the body / wherein the host is unaware.” But if the patient is not clear what song emits from these syndromes that populate American Family, the poet most certainly can hear it. The poems here observe intently. They listen as carefully for the snap of a neckbone to know a chicken is ready to be cleaned as they watch for signs of panic by people facing police violence and mob rage. Throughout this collection, it is the poet’s sensitivity that yields the tenderness of the work. For here is an ear that joyfully discerns Sofia’s “mouth of racket and cry” from The Color Purple, yet seems to listen throughout the house for a mother’s voice or her cane tipping or the moments when she might fall into dream, all the while. A smart, beautiful and urgent collection.
–francine j. harris