Alison C. Rollins
Alison C. Rollins (born and raised in St. Louis city) holds an MFA from Brown University, a Master of Library and Information Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelor of Science from Howard University. Rollins was named a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow in 2019. She is the author of Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Black Bell
A Child is Like a Clarinet
for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka
Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to
an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.
A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.
Personhood posits
promising possibilities.
Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza
Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen
Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,
just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of
a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.
One of these things
is not like the other.
Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.
Black Bell- Print Books
- Bookshop
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Black Bell
Black Bell
A bell’s dome represents the whole universe, the
flat bottom represents the earth, and the hollow
inside represents the space between the rest of
the universe and the earth. When you strike a
bell it sends a message from Earth out into the
universe. Before reading, strike a bell tuned to
F, the note connected to the heart chakra.
Sound can give things a color,
the way eyes can smile.
To give yourself back to yourself,
you must increasingly fold inward
at the etched creases of your palms.
To turn black is to join the fold.
To turn back is to face the music
of the shotgun’s open mouth.
We watch to see
how black bell’s holding up.
By a thread? A string? A hook? A rope?
She sleeps a sleep of the sleepless—
a bell’s body is never at rest.
Black Bell- Print Books
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Alison C. Rollins’s poetry possesses a familiarity across literary traditions that infuses it with depth and striking immediacy. Her painstaking research closes the gap between past and future, contributing to a new way of seeing. Every phrase carefully lends a rhythmic, physical intensity. Riveting on the page, it sings when given voice.