In their debut poetry collection, Paul Tran is unbound by form or inhibition.
The 28 poems of All the Flowers Kneeling, out February 8, communicate trauma, violence, lost homes, and lost selves with a tenderness and understanding that softens the rough realities they encompass. It would be easy to breeze through the slim volume in a single sitting (it’s just 99 pages, including notes), but to do so would be a disservice to the time and thought Tran’s words demand, as well as the heavy feelings they evoke.
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Tran, who has earned poetry fellowships from Washington University and was also awarded a 2021 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, has had their work published in The New Yorker, Poetry magazine, and The Nation, among other outlets, but in All the Flowers Kneeling, they have reached new heights. National Book Award finalist Solmaz Sharif called Tran’s debut “a richness” and wrote that, “Out of violences intimate and imperial, out of survival and self-fashioning, Paul Tran sculpts new forms to contain all…. What a stellar poet for our day.” And it’s that promise of survival—even during the hardest, messiest, most traumatic moments—that makes Tran’s work so moving. Even when it is difficult to read, it is beautiful.
In the second part of “Scheherezade/Scheherezade,” which is split across the first and last sections of the book, Tran writes: “I, too, will be victorious/ Like my mother. Like Scheherezade, I’ll survive/ in the end. I’ll survive the end./ Even when I was helpless, I wasn’t hopeless.”
