Black bell / Alison C. Rollins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rollins, Alison C., author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--21st century.

American poetry.

African American women--Poetry.

African American women.

Genre:

Poetry.

poetry.

Poetry

Physical Description:

xv, 147 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2024]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

I. A bell is a messenger of time

The art of dancing explained by reading female figures

Black bell

The respiratory system

Phillis Wheatley takes Turing test

Riding with death

The loophole of retreat, or the love below, as above

Space is the place

Performance directions

Hymn of inscape

The presence of the body

To pronounce me dead

Unbelievable time required to cover immense distances of love

Love in outer space

[American journal]

Door of the cosmos

II. Springtime again

Metamorphoses

Over the rainbow

Bridge between starshine and clay

Time with Stevie Wonder in it

The clearing

Climate crisis could kill off great tits, scientists warn

A song by any other name

A gentle dialog between eternity and the hours

Topography of silence

Garden of the gods

Hymn of thanksgiving

Elegy for Dred Scott

St. Louis blues

III. A bell is a bearer of time

Idiophone, or memory is a strange bell

Letter from the end of the world

Live long and prosper

A child is like a clarinet

Author's womb as bell

The budding soul

John Cage meets Sun Ra

For Henry "Box" Brown, from Alison "Inbox" @ Brown

Queen Lear

Got 'til it's gone

Look back at it

Cognitive mapping

We gave the clock a face

Keeping time

IV. Swing low, sweet chariot

What the lyric be

Ghost in the machine

The body keeps the musical score

A recipe for the common task

The body faceup

Regeneration

True and false characters

Change of positions

But for the love of God

Nine circles of hell (36 chambers)

Revelation

Quartet for the end of time

Beware of the end word

Steal away

With the future behind us

Black bell.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Rollins, Alison C. Black bell

ISBN:

9781556597008

1556597002

OCLC:

1405935667