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.

'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' Sean 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.