Black Bell

Alison C. Rollins

Inspired by the nineteenth-century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins’s Black Bell explores and catalogues both individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we watch a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry “Box” Brown, and Lear Green appear; we listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test; and we venture through the Inferno as it’s remixed with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-racking notes tuned toward love and liberation. Black Bell navigates what it means to be both invisible and spectacle, hidden and on display, allowing lyric language to become the material for fashioning wearable sculptures akin to Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits.” Integrating performance art practices, metalwork, and sonics, Black Bell becomes a multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of the canvas of the page as well as the poet’s body.

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ISBN: 9781556597008

Format: Paperback

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Riding with Death

after Jean-Michel Basquiat

A single white horse
sounds the skeleton key

that opens the door of
music. For the repass,

I—the caregiver—ride in,
barrelhead, empty-handed.

To “take care of ” means
both caretaking and killing.

My mother took care of
my grandmother. No.

My mother smothered
my grandmother,

meaning acted as her caregiver
until she passed away.

By then, my mother was
already dead, slain by
her mother in youth.

You may wonder,
then, how I came to be.

Love, this poem has already
taken care of the explanation.

Picture me in the form
of a skeletal white horse,
gallivanting, galloping
out of the sea.

My hair spray—a salted wetness
to hold the unruly in place.

My ancestors are gone.
Gone with the wind. Fabulous.
Air filled with critical fabulations.

Foam. Spindrift speaks of
unforeseeable conditions.

When I think about violence
or my progenitors,
my memory topples, tumbles.

About the Author

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis, currently works as a reference and instruction librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science form the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Rollins has worked for various public libraries including the DC Public Library and St. Louis Public Library. She is the second prizewinner of the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry contest and …

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Reviews

“A performance piece, and Rollins is the conductor, the maestra. . . . Rollins’ bravura performance of Black Bell deserves a standing ovation!” —Charles Rammelkamp, Misfit Magazine

“Black Bell showcases the elegant, eloquent, deftly crafted, memorable poetry and clearly marks [Alison C. Rollins] as an accomplished and gifted wordsmith of the first order. Unreservedly recommended for community and college/university library Contemporary American Poetry collections.” —Midwest Review of Books

“Just as Alison C. Rollins’s stunning and wildly expansive Black Bell resists neat description, so the collection compels us to confront the limits of language. A librarian as well as a poet, both callings that invite curiosity, Rollins opens door after door after door in these poems with the hope that the reader will step through. . . . Entrenched in the archive, Black Bell illustrates the power of liberation and love, tracing history’s dizzying connections to the present while illuminating visions of the future.” —Diana Arterian, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The astute second collection from Rollins delivers an unsettling encounter with American history and its reverberations into the present . . . an unflinching and incisive compilation.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review