All the Flowers Kneeling
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.
