Black Bell - by Alison C Rollins (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Black Bell

"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

"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

"Alison C. Rollins' Black Bell and Sheila Carter-Jones' Every Hard Sweetness, both published in April 2024, do the hard work of bringing historical wrongs to the surface, and they do it with style. It's hard not to read them with a sense of sadness, but also some hope that the arc of history will bend toward justice."--Aiden Hunt, Jacket 2

"Messenger, silence, witness."--Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

"Rollins instructs readers on how to navigate her latest collection, using diagrams, performance directives, and historical references within an Afrofuturistic text that challenges poetic norms."--New York Public Library, Best New Poetry Books 2025

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."--Adroit Journal

"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

About the Author

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.