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.
 

NANDI COMER received a joint M.F.A./M.A. in poetry and African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Arts. She has been named a Kresge Artist Fellow and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Blueshift Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, pluck!, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Indiana Review.