Black Bell

by Alison C. Rollins

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.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2024

Reviews

[Kay E. Bancroft]

Alison C. Rollins has truly created something incredible with this collection – not only is it an archive, it’s a reframing of the archive that is so important. I’m grateful for the research and love and time she clearly devoted to this book, because it shows. It’s formally challenging, alongside the offen difficult subject matter, and it allows readers to learn and expand their minds in new ways. I am absolutely blown away by the formal and visual choices, the language, the history. Please read this book – we all need it.

[S P]

A Bell Is a Bearer of Time
*To be performed with bells on. All “writing” is performance, some performance is “writing.”

I am
a product
of my time.
Time is a body
that resembles
a sound without a scale.
Forever, foreclosed fortitude.
In heaven, the dinner bell rings
as elegy. The porch-light stars turn
on their mothering moths. Betrayal
takes at least two, and wherever two
or more are gathered, I am there in
their pulsating timbre. To hear is to hunger
for the gendered race of sound. In my midst,
loneliness listens. In confidence, I am secreted
away. I was today years old when I learned the truth:
a dumbstruck bell is an idiophone. The strike made
by an internal clapper or an external hammer, a uvula—
that small flesh, conical body projecting downward from
the soft palate’s middle. Vocal, vibrating vulva. I am less a writer
who reads than a reader who writes. Therein lies the trouble, the treble clef of
conviction. Come now to the feast of hearing, where Hortense J. Spillers gives a
sermon: We address here the requirements of  literacy as the ear takes on the functions of “reading.”
Call me bad news bear of bestial becoming. Some find me titillating, bare on the stage.
In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman asks, Must the future of abolition be
first performed on the page? Must I write a run-on of runaways?
Must you make out my handwriting? Evidence that loss has limbs.
The clawed syntax. The muzzled grammar. Don’t be afraid.
Kill me with your language. Learn how to mark my
words.* (63)

Cognitive Mapping
Like cartographers, the Language poets
hold tight to their non-sequitur ships.

Everything of importance as a key,
a legend of symbols, which suggests

my grandma's hands were signifiers.
Her geospatial Jell-O, sugar-free.

I stream the whole of her caps-lock knees
into the Internet Explorer of my bones.

I shift the state of my being to delete.
Where there is grief, call it a highway,

imagination, a narwhal in the river.
Take the sum of my parts, congruent to

the space in your compass arms.
Hug the protractor's enlarged belly.

Measure the angle of a mother's
cognitive map with tweets hashtagged

Northwest, the copyright of a biracial
child, blown out of proportion on the

Rolodex's neck, spinning like a map
with no colonies, the land surveyors

having all become beekeepers.
There is a man named Jobs in the machine,

perhaps a second cousin to Job. Divine
comedy. Potatoes are the preexisting text

of a giant's ditty toes,
sullied with allegory.

As a child, I painted pictures with my feet,
once even mapped Africa with my left hand,

the folds in the brain ambidextrous.
Our aversion to wrinkles, a reflection of our egos'

intentions. YKK on the face of zippered body
bags. Mountain ranges capped with ice,

these words cryogenic preservation.
A forest grows from the ashes of Walt Disney.

To name is to freeze.
To translate is to melt.

The best way to decode the environment is
with one's nose, one's nostrils well-read in

debris. Detritus. Horses have always been
astronomers, and billy goats, social-media trolls.

Science has shown that dogs can
understand one another's barks
regardless of where they come from,

and yet the way humans hear differs,
depending on language and culture.

Woof woof, the sound of patriotism.
Bow wow, a vulgar logic for wagging tails.

The web pages are uploading at a bandwidth
that I and this frame cannot support.

Ghosts are sound waves below human hearing,
road trips leading to empty-handed homes,

the cancer cells now traveling with GPS.
I am undressing in a window of doubt.

I am addressing a subject that
I know nothing about, except for

the fact that it
does not exist. (88-90)

[Jeff Morgan]

Black Bell is a collection of poems about escape/liberation/freedom by queer black poet, Alison C. Rollins. She uses the image of a bell, based on a device made of bells worn by an enslaved woman to prevent her from escaping.

Formally, this is very challenging poetry. Rollins uses classical forms, modern forms, and some totally original forms (apparently throwing two dozen words on a page that are only related because they share the same first letter counts as poetry). She also mixes in performance art and includes something akin to stage directions in a drama. At one point she asks the audience to cut out the poems, place them in small envelopes, and write emotions on them.

Content-wise, these poems are challenging as well. While it’s clear that all of the poems relate to the theme of escape/liberation/freedom, they are often enigmatic and esoteric, if not downright vague (not exactly my favorite style of poetry). Rollins fills these poems with allusions. She is as comfortable with classic poets (Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Eliot) as she is with contemporary poets (Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong) as she is with black musicians (Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder, Wu-Tang, Outkast, Ghostface Killah) as she is with historical figures (Henry Box Brown, Dred Scott, Ellen and William Craft). You almost need a degree in black history to pick up all of the subtle allusions.

While I appreciate the research, the artistry, and the craft, not many of these poems resonated with me personally. If I had to pick favorites, the poems about the seven deadly sins near the end of the collection were my favorites. Here’s a sampling:

Gluttony
I got beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes,
lamb, ham, chicken, duck. You name it.
I know better than to fix a to-go plate.
The takeaway is, there are no leftovers

if we all got a seat at god's table.
Mac and cheese, catfish, cornbread,
so much hot sauce the sunset drips.
Big Momma cooks in god's kitchen.

Diabetes means she sits at the right
hand of the father. Lick-your-lips rib tips,
oxtails, grits, gumbo, black-eyed peas,
hoecakes, and sweet potato pie.

Any grandma worth her salt has worn
out her knees in prayer, in hopes that
scraps be nourishment to our bodies.
Do you know what it is to go without?

[Mara]

Favorite poem in this collection is “Topography of Silence.”

Wu-Tang references on page 37 and 113, Jell-O on page 88

“I know what I have said.
I do not know what you have heard.” (p.15)

“Constraint makes
possible a kind of freedom.” (p.19)

“To be human is to be
homeless, the furthest
removed from grandeur.” (p.55)

“I learned the sun does not owe
me a single thing, that I am what
I take for granted.” (p.66)

“every sin I have
committed has been an act of
self-love” (p.114)

[indigo]

im not even gonna rate it bc this book sits at that intersection of academic prestige and black intellectualism anything I do is gonna be called racist or tone deaf but honestly I felt it was sooooo gimmicky and I also watched the harvard talk she gave wearing that bell and I just like I dont know I dont like this kind of self obsessed tracing of history in any lineage or culture. there's not enough humility for me to digest it it doesn't feel honest enough. sorry not sorry

[Sierra]

#TheSealeyChallenge2024

This book is beyond words. It really made me think about the possibility of artform when it comes to poetry. There are so many surprises from the illustrations, historical references, actual print for newspapers during slavery, and references that only WE would catch. This was a lot to chew. I'll be back again for this and other work from Alison C.Rollins.

[Shawn Aebi]

A powerful, albeit at times cryptic, collection focusing on the shackles black women have been forced to wear for centuries, sometimes literally. The cadence with Henry "Box" Brown my favorite.

[Amber]

Inventive and exciting.

[Elena Macdonald]

a lovely collection, deeply informed by history and pop culture.

[Diana Arterian]

Wrote a rave review in LARB for this incredible book. An excerpt: "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. While her outstanding first collection Library of Small Catastrophes (2019) similarly considers historical figures, the personal, and the archive, Black Bell is undeniably more ambitious and capacious."

Read it here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/h...

[DeeSoul]

This is a book I wish I had while writing The Laughing Barrel. This collection, inspired by another artifact of antebellum America, takes us to the edge of language & then dares us to consider what language alone cannot convey. It is as playful with diction as Bob Kaufman, percussive as
Patricia Smith, and so delightfully experimental. I appreciate its explicit relation of writing to performance. A new North Star for me.