Poet Paul Tran’s emotional, operatic narration of their debut poetry collection takes a moment to get used to, but once one does, it’s nearly impossible to stop listening. Their voice rises and falls with the cadence of their words; at times the book seems like a musical performance. The poems are intimate and immediate, exploring the legacies of war and U.S. imperialism, queerness and langauge, famous works of Western art, and, most painfully and poignantly, sexual violence and its traumatic aftermath. Tran’s narration, like the poems themselves, is haunting and vulnerable. Their voice radiates loss, pride, determination, exhaustion, love. The extensive notes section provides important historical and artistic context. Inventive and unflinching, this vivid debut is a beautiful declaration of survival. L.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
All the Flowers Kneeling
All the Flowers Kneeling
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Overview
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.
Editorial Reviews
11/15/2021
"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. (Feb.)
Praise for All the Flowers Kneeling:
“[A] powerful exploration of healing . . . This book is an honest account of the role one can play in pushing forward their own grief – and it teaches us, the readers, to be free.” —NPR, “Books We Love”
“In dramatic yet precise poems like 'Bioluminescence,' this début collection transforms trauma into a site of self-invention. Tran plumbs myth and history alongside personal experience—as a descendant of Vietnamese refugees, as a rape survivor, and foremost as an artist—to achieve an exquisite lyricism.” —The New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2022”
“[F]ull of writing about writing, about poetry as meaning-making, making as meaning . . . elegantly structured . . . There is doubt here, an ambivalent dance with beauty, a resistance to aestheticizing trauma—while one poem asks if 'elegance' is 'revenge,' others, after Randall Jarrell, question the possibility of transforming pain.” —Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review
“Here, imagery is both the language of survival and the language of escape.” —Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine
“[A] radiant debut collection . . . Tran is brilliant at evoking the ways in which the strata of selfhood illuminate one another . . . mesmerizing, multi-part poem[s] […]articulate, revise, and juxtapose the tales that compose Tran’s identity: Vietnamese parents exiled by the American war, remnants of Buddhist faith, landscapes harried by fiery Santa Ana winds, coming of age as transgender and queer, and the speaker’s attraction to men who are, by turns, gods, masters, and perpetrators of unspeakable violations . . . Tran’s poetry finds its desideratum in the eternal pursuit of self-transcendence.” —The Poetry Foundation
“What these [...] poems have in'common'is Tran’s unmistakable voice, whose thrilling, thrumming, hummable cadences testify at every turn, I exist . . . They are nothing short of a diva—doubly so, pop and operatic. Some of their poems exude pop-royalty swagger, strutting over their line breaks, rhyming with a virtuosity matched in poetry only by Gerard Manley Hopkins . . . Other poems resemble arias in their tremendous breath control and earnest, sublime flights.” —The Sewanee Review
“[E]very so often, a true masterwork seemingly springs forth fully formed as if the goddess Athena, armor flashing and sword raised. Paul Tran’s full-length collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, arrived ready for war. This is an exquisitely crafted labyrinth of a book . . . Each poem stands proudly on its own but also perfectly connects to the narrative arc . . . Tran transmogrifies the grotesque to the gorgeous, the victim to the victor, the oppressed to the liberated.” —Electric Literature
“Unforgettable . . . The aftermath of abuse is met head-on by subtle and delicate skill . . . [Tran's] presence on the page is instantly dramatic: there is a gorgeous sensuality to the writing . . . These poems are flamboyant in content, yet their craftsmanship is as discreet as invisible mending: you will not see the stitches unless you seek them.” —The Guardian
“[A] remarkable book dealing with sexual assault and a survivor’s hard-won journey toward recovery . . . For the speaker, each poem is a step away from a metaphorical death, the realm of silence and shame . . . the reader [comes] to believe that this young survivor will prevail, defined not by the wrongs done to them, but by the courage of their coming forward and giving language to the unbearable . . . [A speaker] says, ‘Yours isn’t just a story about survival...Yours is a story about love.’ The poignant pronouncement summarizes the book perfectly, and it is quite moving to witness the speaker arrive at that truth through self-empowerment and self-love.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Ultimately this is a book about reclamation, about agency in the face of abuse (at the individual level of relationships, but also at the systemic level), yes, but it’s also a book about beauty, written in beautiful language . . . [All the Flowers Kneeling is] quite a masterful book. It feels like Tran was thoughtful in a smart way about structure . . . This poet’s toolkit is quite remarkable, especially given that this is a first book, and it gives me such high hopes for future work by Tran.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Stunning . . . Tran’s expansiveness is a major strength: the collection refuses to be a linear roadmap, providing the reader instead with a vast exploration of the aftermath of trauma . . . Tran’s poems are an antidote to a world that asks us to prioritize progress over reflection, mastery over ambiguity . . . a necessary reminder that states of unknowing, too, are fruitful.” —Ploughshares
“[A] spirit of candor and boldness drives Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling . . . bracing and innovative . . . Throughout, their elegant language traces the challenge of trying to pin down violence, to name and exorcise it in the hopes of achieving closure over a story with no resolution . . . All the Flowers Kneeling is ultimately a monument to the self that persists, to the interiority that keeps trying to understand and heal. Amid very real suffering, these poems insist on new futures—especially the unknowable, mysterious, and expansive ones we make for ourselves.” —them.
“With curiosity and compassion, Tran explores the contradictions of the healing process, including its nonlinear path and metamorphic nature, and interrogates their own long held ideas about identity and selfhood in order to discover new truths.” —Harper's Bazaar
“[A] debut that is formidable in scope, form and content. Even with such complex and confident poetic structures and narratives, it’s equally intimate in its vulnerabilities and investigation of the heart, and its ultimate embrace of love. How do we name what is unutterable? How does the unutterable define us?” —Chicago Review of Books
“[R]iveting . . . extraordinary . . . As powerfully as anyone I’ve ever read, Tran captures the manner in which violence inflicted can later be directed by the self upon the self . . . In the face of shame and secrecy, the poet’s candor, lyrical sophistication, and intellectual reach capture the hard work of resilience, the nobility of any soul seeking to save themselves. These poems feel necessary, as all truths are necessary. More than that, they are also beautiful in the way that only art can be simultaneously beautiful and horrific and true . . . a profound act of both grace and will. In the face of unspeakable violation, of sustained exploitation across generations, to tell one’s own story is finally 'the way out', a courageous act of self-avowal.” —Ralph Hamilton, RHINO Poetry
“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you. I felt at times a passenger, a ghost, implicated, consumed, and ultimately delivered back to myself, renewed.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“[Tran has] reached new heights . . . [These poems] communicate trauma, violence, lost homes, and lost selves with a tenderness and understanding that softens the rough realities they encompass . . . it’s [the] promise of survival—even during the hardest, messiest, most traumatic moments—that makes Tran’s work so moving. Even when it is difficult to read, it is beautiful.” —St. Louis Magazine
“[An] ode to survival, both painful and playful. The sheer beauty of the language in these poems left me breathless and stunned. This is definitely a collection I’ll return to again and again.” —BookRiot
“Tran handles the sexual violence that the speaker and their mother experience with the utmost care and tender language, conveying the collection’s themes of survival and love . . . Importantly, Tran’s debut collection testifies that the younger Vietnamese generation inherits more than war history and trauma. We receive survival tactics, lessons of pressing on and loving, from our Vietnamese elders and their journeys.” —diaCRITICS
“This much-anticipated debut from Tran investigates American imperialism, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of trauma recovery . . . the poems here relating these stories are breathtaking, thought-provoking, and fearlessly honest, encapsulating tumultuous lows that will make readers shudder . . . [While] pain is vividly captured, there is also an undercurrent of strength and perseverance within the voices . . . Readers will be sure to find connection and refuge within Tran's standout collection. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal fistarred review)
“[S]tunning . . . Formally inventive, Tran includes a series of persona poems written from the perspective of cadavers used in sixteenth-century anatomical studies, some whose skin was supposedly used to bind books. They also introduce a new form, the hydra, which seeks to ‘resist as much as possible the psychological impulse to reach for closure and certitude.’ A darkly intelligent and exquisite debut.” —Booklist (starred review)
“[Tran] tell[s] hard truths with clarity while exploring the legacy of American imperialism and the effects of sexual violence on the body, mind, and imagination . . . Tran’s poems are curious and searching, especially as they wrestle with the contradictions of trauma recovery . . . 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 . . . These searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love will move and challenge readers.” —Publishers Weekly
“In All the Flowers Kneeling, Paul Tran writes from that most essential of places: the threshold. Between grief and love, past and future, trauma and luminous survival, these are searching, generous poems that enact the resilience of the human spirit, how the art of language making—story, truth telling—allows us not only to survive but thrive. This is a stunning debut.” —Natasha Trethewey, author of Thrall
“Ravishing was the word that came to my mind the first time I read Paul Tran’s impressive debut collection—Ravishing, as in gorgeous; ravishing, as in carried away; to ravish: to drag off by force; to plunder. All the Flowers Kneeling is an extended investigation into what William James called traumata, ‘thorns in the spirit,’ and Tran is our compassionate, exacting, guide: ‘By my own / Invention, I found a way. I’m no artifact. Between art and fact: I.’ Formally inventive, psychologically acute, unafraid to address the complex dynamics of relational trauma both inherited and experienced, Tran’s debut demonstrates the capacity of poetry to tell the truths which will set you free.” —Dana Levin, author of Banana Palace
“All The Flowers Kneeling is a gorgeous debut that names and resists the difficult chiasmus of trauma. Out of violences intimate and imperial, out of survival and self-fashioning, Paul Tran sculpts new forms to contain all. This book is a richness. What a stellar poet for our day.” —Solmaz Sharif, author of Look
“‘Who / can deter- / mine what’s inside / another? What is risked / when we enter?’ asks Paul Tran in their masterful debut All the Flowers Kneeling, an elegant meditation on many things—history, inheritance, language, trauma, how the self tricks the self, defiance—but maybe especially about penetration in its doubleness, both as violation and as relentless inquiry, an insistence on knowing. In poems as virtuosic in their thinking as in their prosodic inventiveness, Tran interrogates meaning itself. Do suffering and knowing go together—must they? Can a story about surviving be the same as a story about love? ‘Wasn’t the word for injury the same in Vietnamese as the word for love?’ Do we survive the past, or merely leave it behind? The gift of these poems lies in their heroic refusal to accept—or indeed to offer up—the usual, too-easy answers. ‘A poem is a mirror / I use to look / not at but into myself. / My story. / Mystery.’ All the Flowers Kneeling maps the journey past bewilderment, to knowing, to, finally, the mystery of unknowing, where history falls away, where—bravely, stripped equally of regret and apology—the life we get to choose for ourselves begins.” —Carl Phillips, author of Pale Colors in a Tall Field
★ 02/01/2022
This much-anticipated debut from Tran (the first Asian American since 1993 and the first transgender poet ever to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam) investigates American imperialism, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of trauma recovery. The multi-part poem "Scheherazade/Scheherazade" explores the idea that in order to survive, victims must tell the story of their survival, and the poems here relating these stories are breathtaking, thought-provoking, and fearlessly honest, encapsulating tumultuous lows that will make readers shudder. In "Galileo," the speaker says, "I, too, had been taken apart./ I didn't want to be/fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless/ like me." While this pain is vividly captured, there is also an undercurrent of strength and perseverance within the voices, as evidenced in "Bioluminescence": "So far below, so far/ away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby/ dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed./ I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay/ alive." VERDICT Readers will be sure to find connection and refuge within Tran's standout collection. Highly recommended for all collections.—Sarah Michaelis
Poet Paul Tran’s emotional, operatic narration of their debut poetry collection takes a moment to get used to, but once one does, it’s nearly impossible to stop listening. Their voice rises and falls with the cadence of their words; at times the book seems like a musical performance. The poems are intimate and immediate, exploring the legacies of war and U.S. imperialism, queerness and langauge, famous works of Western art, and, most painfully and poignantly, sexual violence and its traumatic aftermath. Tran’s narration, like the poems themselves, is haunting and vulnerable. Their voice radiates loss, pride, determination, exhaustion, love. The extensive notes section provides important historical and artistic context. Inventive and unflinching, this vivid debut is a beautiful declaration of survival. L.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176195675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2022 |
| Series: | Penguin Poets |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
ORCHARD OF KNOWING
Into the shadows I go and find you, gorgeous as your necklace of nine hundred and ninety-nine index fingers.
All of them point at me as the kill to complete your mission:
to return to your kingdom by returning to your king a thousand human sacrifices.
You chase me. You swing your sword
yet I remain beyond your reach. I’ll surrender, I tell you,
when you detach from your received idea of purpose.
So you do. You set down your weapon.
But I didn’t mean the blade in your hand.
I meant the blade in your mind.
INCIDENT REPORT
I had a form.
The form said Name of victim. The form named me.
The form was a form of naming. Naming gave me form.
The form said Time of incident.
Time could be measured.
The Incident could be defined. Both had a form.
Both were a form of naming. The form said Age.
Age could be measured by Time.
Age could be defined by the Incident.
The Incident occurred on the night before my twenty-first birthday.
The Time was night as night became night. The Incident occurred in my room at the Time. The Time occurred to me after the Incident.
The form said Race or ethnicity.
Both were constructs. Both marked me.
Both had a form.
Both were a form of naming.
Naming was marking.
I marked the form.
(Asian. Bottom. 4 Now.)
I was a construct.
(Looking 4 Fun. No Strings Attached.)
I was unremarkable.
The form said Sex.
The form listed my options.
I had no option.
I went along with the Sex. The Sex had a Name.
(I won’t say the Name.)
Both marked me.
The form said Affiliation. Everything started out fine. The form said Residence.
I unlocked the door.
I misread Affiliation as Affliction. The Name entered.
I misread Residence as Residual. The Name kissed me.
The form said Alcohol or drugs used at the time of incident.
I was having a good time.
The form said Relationship with the assailant prior to incident. I did the thing I was good at.
The form said Type of coercion or force involved.
The Name hit me.
The form said Please specify. The Name choked me.
The form said Ability to consent was inhibited by. The Name pressed a white towel against my face.
The form said Please specify. The towel smelled like sugar. Please specify.
An ice cream truck drove by.
(Please.)
I heard the song.
SCHEHERAZADE/SCHEHERAZADE
1
Waking again to the spartan furnishing—brass knobs and coat hooks, curtain moth-gnawed and yellowing, plastic mattress atop a twin frame, photograph of me and my mother turned away, book from a class on empire and literature that told the story of a story-
teller who evades the end awaiting her each morning by giving the king not her body but her imagination each night for a thousand and one nights—what humiliated me as I relived my death in that room without sunrise wasn’t my desire for light but my desire for more darkness.
2
Except for the glow of distant ships nothing could be seen.
My mother, staring into the dark, waiting for the light as she waited years ago for another ship to take her from her life, adjusted her glasses.
The past came into view:
line of women. Line of soldiers.
Red sand beach. Sand red with blood. Waves racing in.
A soldier. His rifle. My mother on her knees. Waves retreating.
Once upon a time, she began.
3
In a version of the story there’s no ocean. No waves racing in. No waves retreating. Their behavior neither the behavior of memory nor the past. In a version of the story there’s no soldier. No rifle. No bullet wound marking skull after skull like a period at the end of a sentence. No final thought for each prisoner. In a version of the story there’s no sand. No beach. No adjective to modify or justify the washed-away blood. No propaganda for beauty. No grotesque agenda. In a version of the story there’s no line of women robbed of their womanhood. No prayers. No answering bodhisattva. No means to know if no answer is the answer. In a version of the story there’s no ship. No going forward. No getting back. No inner compass or magnetic field or spinning needle or stars to tell my mother where she is. In a version of the story there’s no story. No sleepless dawn. No twilight. Nothing happened. My mother disappears whatever blights her the way she now makes her living: altering and tailoring the story as though the truth were trousers to be hemmed. She changes and is changed by how she tells her story. There is no truth. Only a version. Aversion. A verge. A vengeance.
4
With him I had an audience. Both heads at attention. Ravenous. A kind of ravishing. Tell me you like it. I told him I liked it. Tell me how bad
you want it. I told him I wanted it bad, maybe, because I did want, badly, to be remade, changed so thoroughly
at the core of my being, the corridor through which he entered like a king,
though he was far from a king, and in doing so
took me, at least part of me, with him. I was willing by then, by force, to entertain my executioner.
I stopped punching. Kicking. Resisting
what I couldn’t resist. What he wanted to hear
I told him. I made my pussy talk. I found in violence a voice.
5
Across the table from my mother I filled two cups with tea.
We sat in silence. We sipped in silence.
Her silence demanding mine.
Some suffering we’d rather not know so we don’t suffer knowledge calling on us in the name of love to blame ourselves and to appropriate the pain
because we think of pain and blame as objects requiring purpose and possession.
That’s not love. That has no name.
We finished our tea. We set down our cups.
What do you see? Leaves. Water.
Waves. Ships. Bodies. Bullets. No shore.
6
Let me be clear.
Inside this story is another story. The frame is a door.
Behind the door is another door.
Both the room and the king are literal and figurative. To use figurative language is to make an argument.
Like Scheherazade my mother and I cleave to and from our story. Like Scheherazade ours is a story of refrain.
The word refrain means not just resist but also repetition. Repetition is emphasis.
The emphasis being the purpose for repetition. My purpose is precision.
Even when I’m unclear I’m deliberate.
When I’m deliberate I’m liberated.
7
Night after night
I returned to the room. Windows closed. Drapes drawn.
Neither spring nor starlight to ignite the air. Only his breath lingering on the pillowcase. His face in the mirror like the image of a swan in a lake. I was the lake doubling and doubting his image. Could I understand what happened if I understood him? Could I slake my rage if I knew what the next day had planned?
To-go containers. Emails. Pills. Laundry. More laundry.
At the foot of the bed, I decided there had to be a way out. There was the way out.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Of the books he wrote about me, my favorite is the book Master had bound with my skin. De humani corporis fabrica. Am I vain?
Born poor. Illiterate. Oblivious to any life but this,
never did I expect perpetuity. Never did I expect a man to want me the way he wanted me. Master didn’t care how ugly I was. My nose flat. My thighs fat. My teeth the color of horse shit. Master dug me out from the ground. He took my corpse into his arms. He held me so close
I forgot I was a body. I became his body of work. Biology. Physiology. Anatomy. Master, doubting the Old Masters, believed doubt could draw a new map to the interior.
In his classroom at the university, Master had me undressed and laid on a table for his pupils to see. He descended from his dais with the dynamism of a god walking among his disciples. Whatever he dictated they scribbled on their slates, lapping his theories and thoughts like dogs lapping piss from a chamber pot.
Some want to be holy. Some want to be human. Some want to believe the nature of the human revealed reveals the nature of the holy.
As Master opened me—groin hard against my hips, hands in my guts—I opened him. I gave him nerve. Tendon. Muscle. Ventricle. Mandible. Sternum. Tibia. Atria. Labia.
Every aspect of myself
I hadn’t resource or reason to fathom—heft of the mind, mechanics of the heart—he dissected. Documented. Paraded before his surgical circus. His spectators and skeptics oohing and aahing. Shuffling in their seats. Fanning back the heat.
Their interest with what was found in me formed
from their interest with what could be in them . . .
I wanted to tell them that they weren’t special. They had no soul beyond their investment in the function of the soul. Their gaze not absolute. Not pure. Not empirical. Only imperial. Impure. Approximate.
I wanted to tell them that there was much they’d never know. They thought they knew what knowledge was. But knowledge was me: the edge of doubt and belief, of what persists Master after Master, reified and repudiated, preserved in a Providence library—air-conditioned, light-controlled—
touched and retouched, awaiting a new Master to approach the edge.
THE NIGHTMARE: OIL ON CANVAS: HENRY FUSELI: 1781
Too hot to rest, I toss my arms off the bed. My night-
gown wet with sweat. I feel you
—a sack of scavenged skulls on my chest
—sipping the salt from my breasts. Imp.
Incubus. Im-
pulse. You and me like a mare
that must be broken in by breaking in-
to. Tamed is how fire is by giving itself something to destroy:
it destroys it-
self. Who
can deter-
mine what’s inside another?
What is risked when we enter?
Caliper. Forceps.
Scalpel. Oculus.
Perhaps you’re the wilderness
that waits with-
in me. Perhaps an-
other mystery, I
open beneath
you. Yoked. Harnessed.
Paralyzed.
At once a-
wake and a-
sleep. I nay.
I knock
over the kerosene lamp. Light of
the rational mind snuffed. Shadow of shadows.
Because I can’t see, I sense.
Your thumb
thrumming my mouth. A
command. Arch-
angel. Vision of invasion.
Insemination.
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