ALL IS THE TELLING by Rosa Castellano
All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano
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About the CollectionAll is the Telling is a compelling, transformative collection bridging the personal and political with an emotional intensity that lingers long after the final page. With an intimate and expansive voice, this collection speaks to the human condition in all its beauty and complexity, inviting readers to reflect on their own lives as they are drawn into the intricate web of memory, identity, and survival. The speaker’s voice is grounded in the immediacy of lived experience, yet it also reaches outward, echoing the broader struggles of our time. In a world that can often feel fractured, the poems in All Is The Telling offer a space for connection, reflection, and healing. Readers are invited to witness moments of profound emotional truth, where the boundaries between self and other, past and present, blur in disorienting and revelatory ways.
At its core, All is the Telling is a meditation on what it means to be human in a world that often demands silence from those who dare to speak their truths. It is a collection that insists on the importance of voice, of telling and retelling our stories so they are not forgotten. The collection’s emotional landscape is vast, encompassing themes of love, loss, survival, and the enduring power of storytelling itself. These poems remind us that survival is not simply to endure but to carry forward the stories that define us and to give voice to the histories that have shaped our identities, often against the odds.
This is a collection for readers who crave poetry that speaks to the soul—poetry that does not flinch in the face of brutal truths but instead transforms them into something beautiful, something that can be held, examined, and, ultimately, shared. All is the Telling will resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the complexities of identity and sought to make sense of a world that can be both brutal and tender. It is a collection that asks us to listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and in that listening, find the strength to tell our own stories. For anyone who believes in the power of words to shape lives, challenge injustices, and celebrate the human spirit, this collection will not disappoint. All is the Telling is vital, alive, and endlessly resonant.
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
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
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
About the Author
Rosa Castellano, originally from Tampa, Florida, 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 forth coming 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.
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Bibliographic Information
ISBN: 978-1-939728-68-5
PUBLICATION DATE: March 1, 2025
AUTHOR: Rosa Castellano