All the Flowers Kneeling
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker
“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review
A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen)
Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"My purpose is precision," Tran writes early in their vivid debut, and they fulfill this purpose, telling hard truths with clarity while exploring the legacy of American imperialism and the effects of sexual violence on the body, mind, and imagination. "What we made," they write, "what he made/ my body do with his body/ day and night, night and day, wasn't love./ I stayed to stay alive." Clarity, however, doesn't mean resolution. Tran's poems are curious and searching, especially as they wrestle with the contradictions of trauma recovery, a process that erodes the "membrane between reliving and relieving" deep pain. These poems embody a spirit of inquiry in their forms, too, many of which are Tran's own. Each provides a unique doorway into the subject matter, what Tran, in the book's notes, calls a way "to resist as much as possible to import, cleanly and clearly, lessons learned from one experience to another." As such, the entries posit that, for trauma survivors, the journey toward healing is rarely straightforward. These searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love will move and challenge readers.
