Black Bell
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.
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Praise for Alison C. Rollins"Like sunflowers turning towards the sun, readers will turn to this astounding poet." --Booklist (Starred Review)"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"In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent." --Publishers Weekly "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 "Much-welcomed newcomer Rollins offers keen insights that librarians and their readers will appreciate." --Library Journal "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 JournalYes, 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