A major obstacle faced by nanopore-based polymer sequencing and analysis is the high speed of translocation of an analyte (nucleotide, DNA, amino acid (AA), peptide) through the pore; the rate currently exceeds available detector bandwidth. Except for one method that uses an enzyme ratchet to sequence DNA, attempts to resolve the problem satisfactorily have been largely unsuccessful. Here a counterintuitive method based on reversing the pore voltage, and, with some analytes, increasing their mobility, is described. A simplified Fokker-Planck model shows a significant increase in translocation times for single nucleotides and AAs (up from ∼10 ns to ∼1 ms). Simulations show that with a bi-level positive-negative pore voltage profile all four nucleotides and the 20 proteinogenic amino acids can be trapped inside the pore long enough for detection with bandwidths of ∼1-10 Khz. The method presented here provides, at least in theory, a potentially viable solution to a problem that has prevented nanopore-based polymer sequencing methods from realizing their full potential.