All Is the Telling by Rosa Castellano
Diode Editions, 2025
People who find out you’ve published a poetry collection sometimes ask, “What’s it about?” Poetry’s complexity makes the question hard to answer: strong poems work with situations, story, and character but also draw unlikely parallels, interrogate their own premises, and take language itself as a subject. When poems flock, their interrelatedness makes description even more challenging.
Yet the interlocking arguments of All Is the Telling, Rosa Castellano’s splendid debut, inspire me to try. The book is about “all the names / we have for belonging,” complicated by mixed Black and white heritage and bearing children who read to others as white (“the moon an empty boat, as I push // life from life: fist, blood, love—a blonde / shock of hair”). It’s about anti-Black violence and prejudice, historically and right now. It’s about how, as the first poem’s title puts it, “Survival is Plural”: connection across difference can save people, and bearing witness is crucial to community. It’s also about time and narrative. Stories—her allusions include Othello, Star Trek, and for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf—shape, empower, and sometimes betray people, and they recur in cycles. Poetry, paradoxically, conjures such tales while disrupting them. Most of Castellano’s section titles, for example, suggest plot but come from Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy”: “Once for Each Thing,” “What Keeps Calling,” “& Again,” “Just Once,” “& Never Again.” These moves echo through the poems themselves, most of which are set in the contemporary U.S.
Nestled among them, though, is an outlier, a stunning sequence in the voices of two sisters, “Feathers Enough to Fly: A Poem Play.” Castellano interweaves research and fairy tale to frame—in nonchronological monologues—a tale of divergent Black lives. May and Bell are born in 1860s Waycross, Georgia, not far from Okefenokee Swamp. As May puts it:
two girls, different as shadow from
shade or skin from skywalked together between
the pines with such regard and familiaritythey could only be sisters.
Because May’s fairness endangers her kin (“white folks / especially hated / to mistake a colored child / for one of they own”), their mother stains May’s skin with tea. A crisis arrives when mother and daughters find swans and pluck the valuable feathers; May flees with the latter to make hats in Baltimore. There she marries a white man and controls her fertility in fear that Blackness will tell in her offspring. Her sister and mother, meanwhile, are jailed until their mother is punished by death. Bell lives on near Okefenokee, finding beauty in the “round black-dark face of the sky” and raising children of her own.
At least, this is what I glean. Compelled by their characters and Castellano’s vivid language, I ended up sketching a timeline for what the sequence reveals in lyric glimpses. This hybrid-genre project is so riveting I wished for more—“Feathers” has the emotional weight, if not the length, of a full book—but, in an indirect way, the rest of All Is the Telling continues the sisters’ tale, dramatizing how narrative reverberates.
“Feathers Enough to Fly” resonates particularly with Castellano’s intermittent series about attending a family reunion at a Florida beach. The speaker rescues her child from a wave even as an Auntie chides him “in a voice bleak as gull-speak: / Aren’t you too old to be calling for your mother?” “Never again this meanness,” is the poem’s answer. The next entry in the series, “Noon / Family Reunion (a haibun),” uses the prose-poetry tension latent in the form to crystallize the whole book’s aboutness:
Above us, papery palms rub together in the breeze, their brown fronds scratch a soundtrack uneasy as those moments pressing play on the family histories that weigh us down, keep us trapped and those
like my child’s sun
warmed shoulders which ask only
to be held.
In powerhouse after powerhouse poem, Castellano holds space for clashing feelings: anger, awe, grief, yearning, tenderness. She also expresses creative ambition, testing through structural variety what poetry can contain. This is, in short, a book with wings.
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Lesley Wheeler, poetry editor of Shenandoah, is the author of six poetry collections, including Mycocosmic and The State She’s In. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Pleiades, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review.