All the Rage 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. At its core dwells “Living in the Abattoir,” a series in which people of color live out their days as both workers and meat. All the Rage simultaneously invokes both anger at ongoing systemic violence and the frivolity of something that is, perhaps temporarily, “trending.”
Read an interview with Rosamond S. King on the Nightboat blog here!
Reviews
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.
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.
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.
Rosamond S, King’s second poetry collection, All the Rage, addresses the everyday joy, pleasure and ever-present force of racism in America. In a time where the focus on and threat of police violence on Black men and women is so great, creativity and artistry continue to rise. This collection addresses the reality of living in America from a multitude of perspectives, exploring how people of color might live in an alternate yet familiar reality.
Simple and direct language butts up against poems structured like riddles. King shows that she can tell the truth through wordplay, irony, and allegory, but most often she chooses to tell it straight, not slant.
In this book bones break. Because brutality. Because blood. Because bile and bullets and badges. Because being. And bygones are not bygones. But bitter, Bland, brackish, beguiling, bare. And Becky, by God. In this book bones break. But they also breathe. Rosamond S. King makes sure of this.
“On this episode of Black & Published, Nikesha is speaking with creative, critical writer, poet, and performer Rosamond S. King about her new poetry collection, All The Rage. The collection was inspired by the lack of indictments handed down in the death of Eric Garner who was killed by police officers in New York in 2014. From that singular incident she crafted a collection set in the fictional world of the abattoir to discuss Black joy and Black pain living in tandem. She sees the collection as an extension of her work as a literary scholar and all around writer be it academic, poetic, or for the love of writing.”
Rosamond S. King previously won a Lambda Award, placing her work in a queer, political context. With All the Rage, King once again embraces poetry as protest, addressing sexuality, Blackness in America, and systemic violence. By looking back at the past and confronting the deep issues and anxieties of the present, King’s collection propels readers toward a better future.
More performative than strictly literary, these hard-hitting poems speak truth to power.
-Richard Price & Sally Price, "Bookshelf 2021," New West Indian Guide
All the Rage (Nightboat), the second collection of poems by Trinidadian-American Rosamond S King, tacking “state violence, racism, and the persistence of Black desire, resistance, and joy.”
Check out our interview with Rosamond S. King about All the Rage, up now on our blog!
Featured in NewPages Book Stand!
Featured in Big Other’s Most Anticipated Small Press Releases of April 2021!
Read “Abattoir Gentrification” by Rosamond S. King from ALL THE RAGE in Poetry Daily!
Read a few poems from All the Rage in a Verse Playlist!
The seeds of All the Rage, my second collection of poems, lie not in the death of Eric Garner but in the day the police officers who murdered him were not indicted for their crime (in legalese, when the grand jury declined to indict). I decided I had to do something: I wrote a poem. Bubbling rage and choking despair. I marched, I taught, I shared, and I wrote poems.
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