A new collection of poems by Lambda Award winner, Rosamond S. King, conceptualizing state violence, racism, and the persistence of black desire, resistance, and joy All the Rage addresses everyday pleasure as well as the persistent condition of racism in the USA-a time marked both by recurring police violence and intense artistic creativity. At its core dwells the 'Living in the Abattoir' series, set in an alternate yet familiar world, in which people of color live in an abattoir as both workers and meat. All the Rage addresses the contemporary realities of life in the USA from a variety of perspectives: being a black person, an immigrant, a woman, and queer. The title All the Rage simultaneously invokes both anger at ongoing, systemic violence and the frivolity of something that is, perhaps temporarily, trending.
Rosamond S. King is performer, poet, and author of All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning collection Rock | Salt | Stone. Her poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, such as The Feminist Wire, Hyperallergic, Harriet, The Caribbean Writer and the award-winning Kindergarde: Experimental Writing for Children. Scholarly publications include Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, and essays in Callaloo, LitHub, Ms. Magazine, and The Radical Teacher. King is creative editor of sx salon and associate professor at Brooklyn College.
Title: All the Rage
Author: King, Rosamond S.
ISBN: 9781643620718
Binding:
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: 2021-05-20
Number of Pages: 112
Weight: 0.1931 kg
King uses English while writing beyond and against the bounds of its conventions, and also foreground the speaking, hearing body-and importantly, the black, queer, female body-as the site where language originates and lands -Publishers Weekly
Lambda Award winner Rosamond S. King's All the Rage (Nightboat, Apr.) presents an intersection of Black, immigrant, female, and queer issues, with the gut-punch 'Living in the Abattoir' series at its heart presenting people of color living in an abattoir where they are both workers and product. -Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Rosamond S. King proves again and again that she is a poet rooted in place with connections across seas and communities. The collection, inclusive of Trinidadian Creole English, hashtags, and outside textual references, ends with a section that takes the reader into moments of bodily and psychic joy. This book, as the title suggests is all the rage. -Electric Literature
It's been a constant question, what kind of art will come from this moment, what kind of art this moment needs. Poet, performance artist, and literary theorist Rosamond S. King's newest collection is a bold and urgent movement towards meeting this unmeetable moment. At once formally innovative and passionate, this collection struggles and dances in a single motion. -Muzzle Magazine
All the Rage offers us an 'etymology of scream,' a music and a poetics of testimony, an imagination and a voice of survivor who asks, and responds, as survivors do: 'You still here? We still here.' Indeed, Rosamond S. King offers us many poetic modes, from documentary to imaginary narrative, but the truest languages of this book are music and tone that speak to us without patronizing, that tell it like it is: 'America the beautiful / I am not safe.' Even the familiar propaganda here is turned into music and memorable phrasing: 'We will protect you by turning the army into border patrol / we will protect you by turning the national guard into the police / we will protect you by turning the police into the paramilitary / we will protect you by attacking you in your homes // we will give you a receipt for your children.' Innovative and incantatory, All the Rage is first of all heart-breaking, honest. A spellbinding, inimitable book. -Ilya Kaminsky, author of National Book Award Finalist Deaf Republic
King works hard magic in the smoke of this infernal manufactory, nose open for at least two kinds of salt, ears open to crack double-jointed syntax, eyes open to those who swear destroying her is divine. She sees them traveling their straight line-this bravura book of curses means to curve them. -Douglas Kearney, author of National Book Award Finalist Sho
All the Rage is a metropolitan poetics where protest and testimony do not spare confusion but makes within these passages-veering between performance and document-a new kind of torque. What are the facts? What are the ironies? Who is contradicting who? What just happened? What gets kept? This book is not only a cry of pain but also for joy, of what is possible and what may be impossible. -LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
All the Rage is a barbwire slaughterhouse of American dysfunction surrounded by a moat of molten fury. Rosamond S. King wrote these poems with a claw hammer in one hand, a blowtorch in the other, and enough decibels to sear any virus, including presidential pestilences, into cinders. This book is highly recommended as a talisman against all forms of oppression and a bugle call for reckoning history. Dive in, dear reader, but remember, the safety's off ! -Tyehimba Jess
The embodied quality of the poems and King's willingness to confront the inherent difficulty of relationship with the Other, who is always us, grounds the work in a somatic poetics that demands the reader pay attention. -M. NourbeSe Philip
King's poems cast sparks, strike lightning. King playfully sculpts with the tenderness of a razor, and she ain't playing. Enter into these poems, and surrender to their spell. -John Keene
These poems are so present, so immediate, that reading this book feels like getting to see King read them. That she is here with me in the room, laughing into my ear, or crying, or screaming, or shushing me, shushing me quietly to sleep, telling me to let my body stretch out, to sigh. The poems are spells, and I'm lucky to witness King conjure, cast, and shape-shift them into being. -Sarah Richards Graba, Tarpaulin Sky
All the Rage by Rosamond S. King addresses everyday pleasure as well as the present condition of racism in the United States-a time marked both by recurring police violence and intense artistic creativity-from a variety of perspectives: being Black, an immigrant, a woman, and queer. -Katy Haas, NewPages
