All the Flowers Kneeling
Complex
Emotional
Profound

All the Flowers Kneeling

Paul Tran2022
“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 “A stunning debut.” —Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of Memorial Drive 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.
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Reviews

Photo of sage lynn
sage lynn@sagelvnn
3.5 stars
Mar 7, 2023

solid collection

+2
Photo of Seher Mohsin
Seher Mohsin@bookstagramofmine
3.5 stars
Apr 13, 2022

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review All the Flowers Kneeling. This book is definitely not a quick read but it is worth the effort that you need to put in. Bioluminescence, year of the money, first law of motion are all really fantastic poems, and I want my own copy of this book to re-read them!

+2
Photo of Emma Younger
Emma Younger@emmarain
4 stars
Mar 5, 2022

walking the line of cliché and super inventive and new, which is something u love

+5
Photo of Hanako T
Hanako T@hananotes
4 stars
Aug 28, 2023
Photo of Amb
Amb@ambortly
1 star
Jul 4, 2023

Highlights

Photo of sage lynn
sage lynn@sagelvnn

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

Page 26

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

Photo of sage lynn
sage lynn@sagelvnn

Anything to carve past

the past, the body I hated

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.

Just more.

Page 29

from “the first law of motion”

Photo of Emma Younger
Emma Younger@emmarain

but think, again then, then and again, that suffering, its human position, isn't entirely random 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

WHEW

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