José Faus’ exhibition at the Library, “We Hold These Truths,” creates blackout poetry with the Declaration of Independence.
Poetry and poets do a lot of work. Alison Rollins’ collection “Black Bell,” for instance, does a tremendous amount.
The collection, which won the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award, takes its title from the 18th and 19th centuries practice of enslavers rigging bells to the enslaved to prevent escape. The book is rich with graphics like diagrams, lithographs, ancient advertisements and shape poems.
Yet even as the poems contend with a horrifying past, the award’s guest judge still found them to hold an “exceptional blend of formal craft, lyricism, music and humor.
“Rollins confronts a dark history but does so with a ferocity that kept me glued to the pages,” says Taylor Byas, a previous winner of the award. “I gasped, I cried, I laughed, I read the poems aloud and danced along with their music.”
On March 11 at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central location, Rollins, a St. Louis native, kicks off a tour of partner organizations: the University of Missouri-Kansas City-The Carolyn Benton Cockefair Chair in Continuing Education, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri State University and Northwest Missouri State, Truman State and Southeast Missouri State universities. See KCLibrary.org/events.
Through May 7, Kansas City poet and artist José Faus’ work is on display, also at the Central location. Like Rollins’ collection, his 10 new blackout poems — printed and framed — take on much more than meter and rhyme.
In the exhibition “We Hold These Truths,” Faus uses the Declaration of Independence as his jumping off place. In two-by-two-foot frames, he redacts bits of text to create poems that could be read as subversive and in doing so prompts fresh interpretation and invites readers to reflect on our shared history and future. See KCLibrary.org/exhibitions.
Kansas Citians have an open invitation to writing classes at the library — including several poetry sessions — if they’d like to engage in the hard work of poetry, too. For a complete list,
visit kclibrary.org/wfr.
