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.

Visibly and amazingly, Paul Tran's poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, charts the reconstruction of a self after an extreme experience. How, it asks, can we reimagine what we have received in order to create something new: an identity, a family, a life, a dream?

These rich, resonant poems of desire, freedom, control, and rebirth draw on the past - the myth of Scheherazade, the violence of the American empire, a fractured history of personal abuse - to show how these both seal and transform. The innovative poetic forms reflect the non-linear experiences of trauma survivors, while the ambitious sequences explore systems of knowledge and the power of storytelling as survival.

Both virtuosic and vulnerable, personal and deeply challenging, All the Flowers Kneeling delights in the discovery and recomposition of the self and ultimately becomes an essential monument to the human capacities for resilience, persistence, and love.

Pages: 128, Dimensions: 15.3x15.3cm