Paul Tran

“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.

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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