Nnadi Samuel’s Eclectic Gaze

As I read Nnadi Samuel’s ‘Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel’—the poem that opens his new chapbook, Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade—I was reminded of ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman. In the 24th section of the 1892 version of the poem, Whitman writes: ‘Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, / Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.’ Whitman’s lines, where he uncovers, liberates, and unapologetically accepts desires that are culturally censored as taboo, are ‘transfigured’ in Samuel’s poem into stranger figurations and subtler associations. The self-glorification of Samuel’s speaker is rendered with an ironic tone, so eloquently confident that it seems immune not only to judgment but also to the physical risks of social nonconformity: ‘I: asphalt glory. / Color riot, in ways that put coffins out of fashion, / snithe the threading to come clean as shorelines.’