Introducing All Is The Telling, by Rosa Castellano
All is the Telling is a remarkable collection of poems that navigates the space between historical reflection and present realities. It offers an insightful exploration of the complexities of selfhood, particularly within the context of systemic oppression and generational trauma. The collection weaves together the personal and the political, revealing the profound ways that identity is shaped and reshaped by history and lived experience.
The poet’s voice oscillates between tenderness and ferocity, creating a space where pain is articulated and resisted through naming and storytelling. This tension between vulnerability and resistance contains much of the collection’s emotional power. The title, All is the Telling, serves as both a mantra and a method—these poems are telling in every sense: recounting, revealing, and reclaiming.
One of the collection’s most compelling features is its use of vivid imagery to ground emotional and political truths. The poems transport readers to the swamps of Georgia, the trailers of Florida, and the shadowed halls of schools and homes. These settings are not mere backdrops but extensions of the body and identity, echoing the speaker’s history and the broader socio-political landscape. The recurring motif of survival as "plural" in poems like Survival is Plural and No Black People in the Trailer Park Except My Dad underscores a collective endurance, where personal memory and generational trauma are intertwined, suggesting that survival is inherited and shared.
All Is The Telling explores the intersections of race and gender, particularly how these identities shape experiences of family, love, and loss. The collection challenges readers to consider how identity and survival are articulated in a world that continuously undermines both. The poems are deeply personal yet profoundly political, never veering into didacticism. The poet skillfully navigates the intimate lyric and the sweeping historical narrative, ensuring readers feel the weight of each moment, each memory, and each body the poems encounter. This book stands as a testament to how poetry can serve as a site of healing, resistance, and survival, leaving readers with a renewed understanding of the power of storytelling.
Two poems from All Is The Telling:
NO BLACK PEOPLE IN THE TRAILER PARK EXCEPT MY DAD OR YOU CAN’T RECOGNIZE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
Everything about the kinked-up linked up coil of girls banging around my insides— that string of black/brown yellow/white paper dolls hot combed braided and sharp as the fugitive tack lost between tracks of torn carpet doubled down on the floor of the trailer I grew up in— everything about those girls gone, till Ceily and Sula and Sethe carved a path to the inside place past blood past heart past past to the place of planting where all my past selves rise, lick wet their palms wipe the ash from their knees and speak. STORMS, AN INHERITANCE the sun/needs someone/to watch it set/the waves/something to pummel so/we stand/in the shallows/abide the smeared sky/the way/our father maple skinned and boiling/endured the white maw/of his office till he could/bear down/on his own dear hearts/buffet us/and be soothed/and the children/those hammered hearts/we raced the white sandtracks/of the grove/plucked oranges the size/of artificial hearts watched for snake/and boar growing taut/searching out the too-much-to-take/it’s pull locomotive/the call of a hurricane/that echoing roar/familiar/as the wrinkled/skin of our storm-soaked/fingers now/somewhere between childhood/and old age I am the gale/that sets the moss-covered branches/to skittering I have belonged/and been free/and like the first/branch broken/against my back/it is still only/wince or dance
Praise:
All is the Telling is relentless in its pursuit of beauty amid “what’s bone-deep and brutal.” Rosa Castellano writes with just the right balance of tenderness and precision as she carves her way through memories shaped by this nation’s founding violences. A luminous debut collection, abundant with quiet possibility.
Frannie Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
In the opening poem of Rosa Castellano’s debut collection, All is the Telling, we hear, “& a person you know will say: / children are resilient / and that’s true. I survived / what I survived.” Resilience is separate from survival, yet they are braided into the hair of “A Girl the Color of Sunshine on Water, the Color of a House on Fire, the Color of Drowning,” as she lays bare the messy truths of Black existence in liminal spaces. Castellano writes of the sweetness within the struggle, “the slow art / of a bee bending into a blossom.” True resilience is the result of healing. Castellano’s poems remind us of the possibility and power within.
Rage Hezekiah, author of Yearn
Rosa Castellano’s All Is the Telling is a raw song of ache. Evoking childhood and collective memory with a razor-sharp pen, Castellano creates a music on the page that gestures towards the act of empathy for the self as an act of empathy for the world: a largeness of heart that wants to take in our shared histories and simultaneously be forgiven its too-fierce embrace. We can’t escape the past, but—with an ear tuned expertly toward forgiveness and kinship—Castellano’s poems can teach us to live in the unfolding promise of the present.
Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
The unsparing poems in Rosa Castellano’s All Is the Telling move like “the whisper of wings/ as they widen/ and wear/ imperceptibly down/ to the sea,” which is to say they manifest true presence. These poems abide, never leaving our side, in spite of the inhumanity they invite us to bear witness to. And to bear. For all our sake.
Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete
Rosa Castellano’s All is the Telling is a collection in which both historical and contemporary understandings of Black female subjectivity are two waves colliding. As a result, we see a portrait of Black girlhood that acknowledges the deep, historical knowing that young Black girls often carry, their early realizations about the world’s true nature, and how love and violence are inseparable. These astute Black girls become Black women who tell this world’s story as they truly are, who come bearing all of the news, good or bad. Only in their hands, and in Castellano’s, do I trust that the mirror held up to me will be spotless—I see America and its history, which means that I see myself and all of my ancestors before me.
Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Rosa Castellano, originally from Tampa, FL, is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest. Her work can be found or is forthcoming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others. All Is The Telling is her first collection of poetry.
If you’re at AWP you can hear Rosa and other amazing Diode authors read here:
And if you’re in Richmond, VA, you can join the launch party for All Is The Telling:
So excited to read All Is The Telling!