All “Reading” is Performance: A Review of Alison C. Rollins' Sophomore Collection, “Black Bell” (Copy)
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All “Reading” is Performance
A Review of Alison C. Rollins' Sophomore Collection, Black Bell
By DeeSoul Carson
I first encountered Black Bell (2024) at AWP 2025, where I was immediately intrigued by the image on its cover, a contraption of bells & crucifix-adjacent iconography set against a deep, Black background. My own collection had just been picked up, centered around a different relic of America’s era of enslavement (although, it could be argued, that is an era we have never truly abandoned). 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, & so delightfully experimental.
This book is an archive in conversation with a multitude of voices. Over & over, the music of Sun Ra reappears & reorients us in the text, a voice pointing us to our afrofuture as we look into the afropast, the bells of the collection chiming in the distance between. Rollins does not shy away from “after” poems; so many of the works in here make direct mention of their influences, the collection a nexus of music, paintings, language, propaganda, advertisements, & so on & so on.
I read this collection as part of my 2025 Sealey Challenge, an endeavor — first started by Nicole & taken up by poets all over the world — that challenges one to read one book of poetry a day in the month of August. Reading a full book in one sitting is a tall order in & of itself; in this particular instance, it coincided with a 28-hour train ride my beloved & I were taking from Chicago back to our home in Brooklyn, traveling a track that dipped us down towards the nation’s capital before swinging us up the coast, passing through miles upon miles of forest & small towns & fields that seemed to multiply, the recursive landscape of a too-big country. I was so entranced by the beauty possible of a country that is so violent in my mind, so much so I tried to put the experience to paper:
Somewhere around the eighth hour of the train ride, I am moved
to marvel by the sight of the countryside, the hills rolling
like a Windows 95 background, the congregations of cattle
about their cud-chewing business, hay bales arranged inexplicably
neat in rows like couplets. O, America, you could be beautiful
if you wanted. To survive this place, I am choosing to believe you do.
We did not take this method of transportation by choice, though it certainly was a net-positive experience & helped me to appreciate what many of us consider flyover country. At the time, we were avoiding airports on account of my partner’s “legal” status, something that has since been “rectified” but at the time was a source of great stress in this country of contradictions.
Fugitivity is an interesting concept that imposes a criminal charge upon the act of escape. As we avoided potentially negative run-ins with “law” enforcement officials in airports by traveling by railroad, I was reading this book concerned with people who were criminalized for the audacity of trying to escape their bondage. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 “required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate.” As we learn in the collection, the device of iron horns & bells we see on the cover were an alarm system for these “fugitives,” as described in the book’s opening epigraph, taken from Moses Roper’s A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1837):
This instrument he used to prevent the negroes running away, being a very ponderous machine, several feet in height, and the cross pieces being two feet four, and six feet in length.
The enslaved were thought to be property, not people, & property needed the proper wards to prevent misplacement. Black Bell explores various visual artifacts & puts them in conversation with each other to prompt a conversation on our historical postures toward or, more often, away from liberation. Marking our passage through the book are the collection’s eponymous Black Bell poems, each one existing in one of the book’s four sections.
Each one asks us to strike a bell tuned to a different frequency before reading the respective poem, the resonance meant to connect us to a different chakra. Seeing that I somehow left my bells at home before boarding the train, I opted for a recording of tingsha bells on YouTube, allowing the pace of the bells chimes to dictate how quickly I read the poem, only reading a stanza between each strike. The experience forced me to slow my reading & focus my experience when I was just trying to get through my daily literary commitment.
The poems ask us to interrogate our own relationship to bells. My own relationship to them, admittedly, is sparse, only really associating them with the passage of time in grade school. One notable exception to this, however, is a memory from my 7th grade Spanish class. My teacher, a reserved & cool-headed older man, kept a service bell at his desk that he used, to no avail, to redirect the attention of our adolescent buzzing. One day, sick of repeating himself & sick of ringing, he threw the bell to the ground with a force none of us ever expected of him, so hard that it burst apart, that it stunned us into silence. I still think about it sometimes, that broken brass, that man tearing up in frustration at us, that class of students focused, for a moment, on a feeling outside of themselves.
When you think of it, teaching is its own kind of performance, history a cruel, repetitious script we continue to put on, the bell a marker of time & caller of attention. In the book, a bell rings in 1773 & Phillis Wheatley is trying to convince us she is more than the literate negro her enslavers programmed her to be (“Phillis Wheatley Takes Turing Test”):
🔊What do you do
I arrange my hands
into birds that sing
songs only I know
🔊 I meant what is your occupation?
To evade. To make a living
by staying alive.
A bell rings in 1619 & we are a strange shipment in a strange land that will make strange fruit of us. A bell rings in 1829, or 1857, or 1772, & Black people are running from their captivity, White people putting out ads to get them back where they “belong.” A bell rings in 1849 & Henry “Box” Brown is shipping himself to the Promised Land, or a bell rings in 2022 & Alison “Inbox” at Brown has built herself a box she does not want to be confined to, or a train horn sounds in 2025 as I decipher an inscription of Phillis Wheatley’s lungs. The bells chime to us in this collection over & over, calling our attention, beseeching us to look, to face with open eyes history’s weight & plight upon the backs of Black people.
What I appreciate about this collection is a blurring of the line between page & performance. In the book’s world, all of it is a part of the grand act of engaging with the text, reading, writing, & listening all gradations of an interaction with text. The collection is full of diagrams, collage, illustrations, concrete poetry, a visual poetics that pushes us past the limitations of language. Sometimes, the poems offer us a shape to sit inside. Sometimes, the poems are whatever questions are brought up in the space between an artifact of the archive & the facts of history. Wherever you fall in this book, the collection is asking you to sit in it, to listen, to expand your notions of the page past its margins.
Listen to DeeSoul Carson in conversation with Alison C. Rollins on the next episode of e·pon·y·mous!
About DeeSoul Carson
DeeSoul Carson is a poet, educator, and host of the O,Word? podcast. A Stanford alum, his work is featured or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, & elsewhere. For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
About Alison C. Rollins
Alison C. Rollins is the author of the poetry collections Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes. Rollins holds an MFA from Brown University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
