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 elucidates 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.

Order from Penguin Poets (US) and Penguin Books (UK).

Select Poems

Bioluminescence, The New Yorker, June 2021
Hypothesis, Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets, May 2021
Provenance, The Nation, February 2021
Galileo, Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets, March 2020
Copernicus, The New Yorker, January 2020
Incident Report, Poetry Magazine, October 2019
The Cave, Poetry Magazine, October 2019
Endosymbiosis, Poetry Magazine, October 2019
Like Judith Slaying Holofernes, Poetry Magazine, December 2018
The Nightmare, Poetry Magazine, December 2018
Scientific Method, Poetry Magazine, April 2018
Chrome, The New Yorker, September 2017
Elegy with My Mother’s Lipstick, The Boiler Journal, March 2017