‘Gorgeous, instantly dramatic, superb … an unforgettable collection’ kate kellaway , observer
All The Flowers Kneeling
‘Brave . . . The pendulum between resistance and repetition in trauma both personal and historical moves throughout this striking collection, which is full of mirrors, pictures, paintings and retold myths, as though trying to articulate the unspeakable from various angles . . .Though often nightmarish and dark, there are flashes of abandon, starlight, and moments of shimmering release that extend from costume to cosmos, so that by the end the speaker is running “naked but for my snakeskin coat / so fast through wind I become the wind” . . . an auspicious debut’ Seán Hewitt, Irish Times
‘A queer, transgender Vietnamese American – such labelling scarcely serves as an introduction – Tran’s presence on the page is instantly dramatic: there is a gorgeous sensuality to the writing but a reason for readers to stay alert, to be on guard. A story of sexual abuse is unfolding . . . Tran’s work is filled with purpose . . . there is a momentum, a thespian verve that does not mask the work’s integrity. There is courage in their ongoing confrontation with pain. One of the questions that arises is: can trauma be contained by form – and how? . . . 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. And it is invisible mending, in the fullest sense, that Tran does best . . . superb and ungovernable . . . [with a] shimmering tension . . . [an] unforgettable collection’ Kate Kellaway, Observer
‘Dramatic yet precise . . . this debut 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’ New Yorker, Books of the Year
‘[A] powerful debut . . . marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence’ New York Times Book Review
‘[A] vivid debut . . . telling 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, 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 . . . These searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love will move and challenge readers’ Publishers Weekly
‘[A] radiant debut collection . . . a vision of [Tran’s] own self in transformation from youth to adulthood, otherness to wholeness, and nothingness to the substance of art and wisdom. Tran is brilliant at evoking the ways in which the strata of selfhood illuminate one another . . . the conviction that poetry is the only safeguard against the abyss underlies the sometimes excruciating power of these poems . . . Tran’s poetry finds its desideratum in the eternal pursuit of self-transcendence’ David Wood, Poetry Foundation
‘In Paul Tran’s stunning debut poetry collection, the word “trauma” is never written. Instead, a violent encounter permeates the speaker’s environment, informing their descriptions of visual art, the natural world, and family history, specifically contextualized by the United States’ brutal intervention in Vietnam’s civil war. Survival in the face of bodily harm is everywhere. Here, 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 command of the poetic line is immediately apparent . . . the entire collection is . . . crafted with remarkable lyric precision . . . Here, we are gifted an alternate chronology, a queer temporality that favors multiplicity over neat beginnings and endings. Tran’s poems are an antidote to a world that asks us to prioritize progress over reflection, mastery over ambiguity. Their collection is a necessary reminder that states of unknowing, too, are fruitful’
Madeleine Cravens, Ploughshares
‘A testament to queer self-love . . . [a] spirit of candor and boldness drives
Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling. An exploration of sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, and the ravages of US imperialism, the book examines what it means to choose life in the wake of violence. Through bracing images and innovative poetic forms . . . 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 . . . a monument to [what] persists’ them.us
‘Every so often, a true masterwork seemingly springs forth fully formed as if the goddess Athena, armor flashing and sword raised . . . All the Flowers Kneeling arrived ready for war . . . an exquisitely crafted labyrinth of a book that deconstructs, decolonizes, and triumphs over a variety of personal and societal traumas . . . Each poem stands proudly on its own but also perfectly connects to the narrative arc as if [an] intricate puzzle piece. Wielding poetic form and language as weapon and wound, Tran transmogrifies the grotesque to the gorgeous, the victim to the victor, the oppressed to the liberated’ Electric Literature
‘Masterful . . . 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 . . . 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
‘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
‘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. 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
‘Beautiful, sensuous and plural, Paul Tran has written a vital and visceral collection. Breathtaking’ Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto and Othered Poems
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Tran received their BA in history from Brown University and MFA in poetry from Washington University in St Louis, where they were the chancellor’s graduate fellow and senior poetry fellow. They have been awarded a 2021 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from Stanford University. Currently an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Paul’s work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere.
Paul Tran
All
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the USA by Penguin Books, an imprint of Random House LLC 2022
First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2022
This edition published 2024 001
Copyright © Paul Tran, 2022
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Pages 93–8 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 YH 68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN : 978–1–802–06007–2
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All the Flowers Kneeling
