Black Bell
-
- 11,99 €
-
- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The astute second collection from Rollins (Library of Small Catastrophes) delivers an unsettling encounter with American history and its reverberations into the present. Taking its title from the practice of enslavers attaching iron bells on rods to enslaved people to prevent them from escaping, the collection plumbs the relationship between sound, Blackness, and performance as possible avenues for ongoing resistance and liberation. The first entry, "A Bell is a Messenger of Time," suggests that the unjust entanglements of the past continue to haunt: "Barnacle bells. Irremovable attachments. Even when I ghost you, you still hear me." Rollins draws on more recent technologies to call to mind current issues surrounding racial bias, as in the poem "Phillis Wheatley Takes a Turing Test," which includes instructions for one of its two voices to be read "via a computer-generated or synthetic voice," as though AI gets to determine whether the foundational poet of the African American tradition is, in fact, human. Formally inventive poems incorporate diagrams, such as "Hymn of Inscape," inspired by Harriet Jacobs's and Henry "Box" Brown's unconventional and harrowing escapes from slavery: "A nation is an open secret/ ...To escape is to sing." It adds up to an unflinching and incisive compilation.