Author: Paul Tran
Publisher: Penguin Books (New York). 112 pp.
Type of work: Poetry
All the Flowers Kneeling, Paul Tran’s debut collection, explores the experiences of a young, queer, transgender Vietnamese American dealing with the aftermath of abuse and imperialist violence, seeking acceptance, hope, and a way of making sense of their past.
Paul Tran began their career as a slam poet, winning the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam in the 2010s and going on to represent the group in the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed in the top ten. All the Flowers Kneeling (2022) is thus both a debut and the work of an experienced poet who has been honing their craft for approximately a decade, giving the collection a voice that is both fresh and assured.
The poems in All the Flowers Kneeling are largely in a personal, confessional vein, exploring various forms of violence and disempowerment. Tran’s parents both experienced the horrors wrought by US imperialism during the Vietnam War; Tran describes their mother’s experience in “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” (“Line of soldiers. / Red sand beach. Sand red with / blood. Waves racing in”) and their father’s in “Chrome” (“viscera-flooded streets” and “His uncles wearing nothing but name tags around their necks, lying / in a ditch of saw-toothed rocks”). Tran’s father was abusive, and Tran was also sexually assaulted when they were in college, adding personal trauma to generational trauma.
Many of the poems in All the Flowers concern attempts to make sense of these traumas through the use of narrative. Occasionally, these narratives are externally imposed, as in the early poem “Incident Report,” in which the speaker fills out a report of their sexual assault and struggles with the framework that the report forces their experience into, including the categorization of the speaker as “victim.” Much later in the volume comes the similarly structured “Progress Report,” which appears to be a psychological evaluation the speaker fills out in the process of seeking support for dealing with their trauma; this form renames the speaker as a “survivor.” “Renaming gave me new form,” they say. This is also an external framework, but one that the speaker clearly finds more helpful.
However, for the most part, the drive to impose a narrative comes from the speaker themself. This form of coping seems to have been inherited from their mother; it is to the two of them that the title “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” refers. “She changes and is changed by how / she tells her story,” that poem states; later, it reflects that the story of Scheherazade “was her gift to me, how to survive / we told the story of our survival.” Trying to understand their own story, the speaker seeks resonances in myth, seeing something of themself in such figures as Persephone, Orpheus, Icarus, the folkloric Buddhist monk Ngài Mục Kiền Liên, and Saint Teresa. Famous paintings and incidents from the history of science also provide angles from which to explore the poet’s feelings and experiences. Ultimately, all of these influences are synthesized into the speaker’s telling of their own story, imposing meaning on everything that has happened to them and finding in this act “the way out” of the cycle of reliving the pain of their past.
The power of art is discussed in many of the poems; particularly notable in this regard are the two poems titled “The Cave,” which both imagine the feelings of the paleolithic humans who made the first cave paintings. However, the speaker is also wary of relying too much on art at the expense of living in the real world, stating in part 13 of “Scheherazade/Scheherazade,” “I want a life that can’t be corrected / /by my imagination.”
The focus is not solely on art, however; science comes up with surprising frequency in the collection. Mythology, visual art, and, of course, the work of other poets are all familiar ground for poetic inspiration, but Tran draws from a wider variety of sources. The three poems titled “Scientific Method” all look at historical scientific breakthroughs from the perspective of the experimental subjects. In the first, the speaker is a cadaver being dissected by an early anatomist; poor and marginalized in their lifetime, their body has now been taken and used without permission. In the second, the speaker is one of the juvenile monkeys in Harry Harlow’s famous “cloth mother/wire mother” experiment that studied models of attachment between babies and parents. The third comes from the perspective of a potted plant enclosed in a lightless cabinet to find out whether its daily cycle of opening and closing its leaves would continue even in the absence of sunlight. Though these are arguably more fanciful than most of the poems in the collection, their thematic connection to the more autobiographical poems is clear.
Scientific inspiration can also be seen in “Galileo” and “Copernicus,” in which the speaker reveals their disillusionment after their assault (which is compared to the disillusionment of discovering that Earth orbits the sun rather than vice versa) and struggles with the fact that the world continues to spin even as they feel that time has stopped for them. Meanwhile, in “Bioluminescence,” the speaker compares themself to a strange deep-sea fish and describes finding community with other outsiders and survivors: “Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions / we proved that life can exist.” And in “Endosymbiosis,” the speaker uses the concept of symbiotic creatures to characterize their trauma as a second presence that “lived on / inside me.”
Tran both plays with traditional poetic forms and invents new ones. “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” is a crown of fourteen sonnets, some written in terza rima, the form of interlocking rhyming triplets notably used in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy of the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, one of the volume’s longest poems, “I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching across the Distance between Us,” is written in a nonce form that Tran calls “the Hydra.” Each section of the poem consists of thirteen lines; taking the first word of each forms a sentence. The last line of each section provides the thirteen words from which the next section draws—not unlike a villanelle, but less tidy. Indeed, the untidiness is the point, according to Tran’s end notes. They write that the line count of thirteen was chosen because sonnets often have fourteen lines; the fact that the fourteenth line is “missing” denies closure.
The language of the poems is characterized by a sort of wordplay—splitting words apart or joining them together to create new homophonous phrases, finding words within words, and rearranging letters. “I See Not Stars” talks about “the if in the middle of life” and about “love” and “voice” being “wrung from violence.” “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” states, “There is no truth. Only a version. Aversion. A verge. A vengeance.” The poems also often play with multiple definitions of words—“refrain” meaning “to resist” as well as something that is repeated; “surrender” being used as both a transitive and an intransitive verb.
The volume’s structure is somewhat unusual. Just as the fictional Scheherazade delays the resolution of each of her tales, All the Flowers has many sets of paired or grouped poems that generally appear at opposite ends of the volume, creating a symmetry, or a sort of nested structure. Notably (and fittingly), “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” itself is split into two parts, one toward the beginning and one toward the end, with continuously numbered sections making clear the fact that it is meant to be interpreted as a single poem. The rest of the related poems—the opening “Orchard of Knowing” and the closing “Orchard of Unknowing,” “Incident Report” and “Progress Report,” two poems titled “The Cave,” and the three “Scientific Method” poems, among others—are somewhat more loosely connected, but always thematically linked.
All the Flowers Kneeling received an enthusiastic response from critics. Much of the praise focused on the emotional force of Tran’s writing. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly, for example, described the poems as “searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love.” David Woo, writing for the Poetry Foundation, also noted the poems’ “sometimes excruciating power,” and Rigoberto Gonzalez, reviewing the volume for Datebook, praised the poems’ speaker for the courage in “coming forward and giving language to the unbearable.”
Some reviewers also lauded the collection’s lack of a definitive resolution—its resistance to painting the speaker’s trauma as something that has been overcome. Elisa Gabbert, for the New York Times, noted positively that “the poems remain in between-ness” rather than finding a neat conclusion. Tran’s experimentation with poetic form was also noted in many reviews. Kate Kellaway, writing for the Guardian, praised the “Hydra” form that Tran has invented, saying that “their craftsmanship is as discreet as invisible mending: you will not see the stitches unless you seek them.” The reviewer for Publishers Weekly said that the poems’ forms “embody a spirit of inquiry.” Kellaway also noted the overall collection’s “careful symmetry,” which Gabbert additionally described as “flowerlike.”
All the Flowers Kneeling draws on a wide range of inspirations and cultural references to describe pain but also hope and resilience. Meticulously crafted at every level, from word choice to poetic forms to the structure of the collection itself, it is a powerful and haunting work that lingers in the reader’s memory.
Author Biography
Paul Tran has received a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2021 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, they became an assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.