All the Flowers Kneeling

By: Paul Tran

Narrated by: Paul Tran

Finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker

“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

“This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review

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.

©2022 Paul Tran (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[A] radiant debut collection . . . Tran is brilliant at evoking the ways in which the strata of selfhood illuminate one another . . . mesmerizing, multi-part poem[s] […]articulate, revise, and juxtapose the tales that compose Tran’s identity: Vietnamese parents exiled by the American war, remnants of Buddhist faith, landscapes harried by fiery Santa Ana winds, coming of age as transgender and queer, and the speaker’s attraction to men who are, by turns, gods, masters, and perpetrators of unspeakable violations . . . Tran’s poetry finds its desideratum in the eternal pursuit of self-transcendence.” —The Poetry Foundation

“[E]very so often, a true masterwork seemingly springs forth fully formed as if the goddess Athena, armor flashing and sword raised. Paul Tran’s full-length collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, arrived ready for war. This is an exquisitely crafted labyrinth of a book . . . Each poem stands proudly on its own but also perfectly connects to the narrative arc . . . Tran transmogrifies the grotesque to the gorgeous, the victim to the victor, the oppressed to the liberated.” —Electric Literature

“[A] remarkable book dealing with sexual assault and a survivor’s hard-won journey toward recovery . . . For the speaker, each poem is a step away from a metaphorical death, the realm of silence and shame . . . the reader [comes] to believe that this young survivor will prevail, defined not by the wrongs done to them, but by the courage of their coming forward and giving language to the unbearable . . . [A speaker] says, ‘Yours isn’t just a story about survival...Yours is a story about love.’ The poignant pronouncement summarizes the book perfectly, and it is quite moving to witness the speaker arrive at that truth through self-empowerment and self-love.” —San Francisco Chronicle

SPEECHLESS

The best poetry book I've read/heard in a while! So moving. Also, the narrator is the poet, which makes this a very special book to listen to.