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Sweeping from the eighteenth century to futurist fabulations, Black Bell harmonizes poetry with performance art practices in an investigation of fugitivity.
Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins's Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we see a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry "Box" Brown, and Lear Green; readers can listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test or venture through Dante's Inferno remixed with Wu-Tang Clan's 36 Chambers. Poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-wracking 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 sonic, Black Bell becomes multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of both the page and the canvas of the poet's body.
"Like sunflowers turning towards the sun, readers will turn to this astounding poet." —Booklist (starred review)
"In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent." —Publishers Weekly
"Much-welcomed newcomer Rollins offers keen insights that librarians and their readers will appreciate." —Library Journal
"The range of Rollins' poetic skill is remarkable. The result is a collection of poetry which is magnificently crafted, readable, and crucially important." —New York Journal of Books
"Some dense and haunting, Rollins' poems are always precise and exacting of attention from the reader…The poems continue to give upon each reading." —Ms. Magazine
"Alison Rollins's debut collection sparkles with a compassionate intelligence that relentlessly catalogs suffering in the hopes that enumeration might somehow assuage or make meaning of it, or at least serve as a mode of connection." —The Adroit Journal
"In a stunning debut collection of poems, Alison C. Rollins makes use of imagery relating to archives, texts, figures from history, card catalogs, classifications—libraries as evocative troves of imagery, blurring eras, familiar phrases and identities." —Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine
Yes, these poems are lit and enlightened, but Alison C. Rollins's lively charms are always rooted to a notion that 'only things kept in the dark know the true weight of light.' The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth. [Library of Small Catastrophes] is an electrifying debut. —Terrance Hayes
This information about Black Bell was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alison C. Rollins (she/her) is the author of Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she holds degrees from Brown University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Howard University. A recipient of fellowships with Cave Canem, Callaloo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Poetry Foundation, Rollins was awarded support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Brown University's Artist Grant. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has held faculty and librarian appointments at institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
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