Paul Tran

'Gorgeous ... intense ... shimmering ... [an] unforgettable collection' Observer 'Beautiful, sensuous and plural ... a vital and visceral collection. Breathtaking' Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto & Othered Poems 'Brave ... this striking collection ... articulates the unspeakable from various angles ... often nightmarish and dark, there are moments of shimmering release ... an auspicious debut' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times '[A] powerful debut ... marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty' The New York Times Book Review 'Vivid ... searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love' Publishers Weekly 'A testament to queer self-love ... a monument to [what] persists' them.us 'A true masterwork ... an exquisitely crafted labyrinth of a book' Electric Literature This is a book about survival. This is a book about love. Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, charts the rebuilding of a self in the wake of extremity. How, it asks, can we reimagine what we have been given in order to make something new: an identity, a family, a life, a dream? These rich, resonant poems of desire, freedom, control and rebirth reach back into the past - the tale of Scheherazade, US imperial violence, a shattering history of personal abuse - to show how it both scars and transforms. Innovative poetic forms mirror the nonlinear experiences of trauma survivors, while ambitious sequences probe our systems of knowledge-making and the power of storytelling as survival. At once virtuosic and vulnerable, confessional and profoundly defiant, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacities for resilience, endurance and love.

All the Flowers Kneeling

Emma Younger

sage lynn

because I was not so much exhausted as I was / just bored of feeling everything and nothing / at all. At once. At last,

gash after gash, I reached inside. / Wrists. Hips. Thighs. I found / not the source of my regret. Not the force to stop it. 

from “landscape with the fall of Icarus: oil on canvas: Pieter Bruegel the elder: 1560”

because someone has to decide, at some point, with purpose / or not, that they’re going to get / what they want or what they tell themselves they want 

in order to get what they really want / even if it means, hurting another, even if it means hurting them both, / even if they can’t discern what they really want

or that they’re hurting, yet, / until the hurt and the want, lacking / explanation, or eluding it, become indiscernible 

from the rest of their suffering, confused for and eclipsing / that suffering

All the Flowers Kneeling quotes

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