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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Black Bell

Black Bell

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $22.00

ISBN10: 1556597002
ISBN13: 9781556597008
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: Apr 23 2024
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.55 Width: 7.32 Depth: 9.06
Language: English
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.

Also from

Rollins, Alison C.

Also in

General Poetry