American Family: A Syndrome
Nandi Comer

American Family is focused on race relations in America, including pieces titled: 

Earthly Death Syndrome

Singing Skin Disorder

Why I Don't Call On Cops

Poet Nandi Comer writes prose poems using impactful techniques I've not seen before. My favorite is alongside poems in black font is narrative in gray font. Fellow poet francine j. harris has this to say about American Family:

“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."

Poet Caroline Maun also writes prose poems in her Accident collection, interspersed with black & white reproductions of Janet Kelman's "Glass Art."

From the publisher of Accident by Caroline Maun:

“Accident is a series of vignettes about a motorcycle accident, told in the nonlinear way that memory works. This is juxtaposed with observations on the randomness of nature, the opportunities for life and death. The struggles of insects, birds, fish and flora, and our part in their dramas, even if only as observer, provide a counterpoint to the details of another relationship that almost didn’t make it. This intuitive, delicate interweaving of human accident and the natural world broadens our view of trauma and leads us to reflect on the tensions of freedom and captivity, and capacity and incapacity, in a world where instruments that may harm us lie idle all around, and our most basic impulses may put us at deep risk.”

See a sample page.

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