Natural Frequency

Natural Frequency is a lyrical collection of thirteen poems and narrative meditations about the forces that shape a human life—and the moments when we lose touch with the truest version of ourselves. Moving through childhood, desire, grief, memory, faith, loneliness, and survival, Eric Brent Nunnally finds revelation in ordinary places: a gate a boy cannot cross, a fogged bathroom mirror, a lakefront parking lot, a father’s kitchen, a city street after heartbreak, and the alleys and garage roofs of Chicago’s South Side. At the center of the collection is the idea of a “natural frequency”—the inner rhythm that exists before fear, habit, expectation, and experience begin to distort it. These poems ask what happens when the heart forgets that original sound, and whether love, honesty, memory, and faith can help us recover it. Blending narrative poetry with lyrical reflection, Natural Frequency is intimate without sentimentality, philosophical without losing sight of the body, and attentive to humor, danger, sensuality, tenderness, and grace. Each piece stands on its own, yet together they form an emotional arc about becoming, drifting, surviving, and finding one’s way back. For readers drawn to contemporary poetry, autobiographical verse, Black literary voices, and reflective writing about identity and memory, Natural Frequency offers a deeply human meditation on what it means to return to yourself.