We sat in silence. We sipped in silence.
Her silence demanding mine.
Some suffering we’d rather not know
so we don’t suffer knowledge
calling on us in the name of love
to blame ourselves and to appropriate the pain
because we think of pain and blame
as objects requiring purpose and possession.
- From “Scheherazade / Scheherazade,” page 9
Throughout the poetry in Paul Tran’s debut collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, readers are presented with a persistent, surreal, and confounding sense of connection. Tran’s speakers meet the other in opposition and embrace, in collectivity and in confrontation, alongside threads of internal verisimilitude and ecstatic imagination. This is a book of situations, moments, spotlights, and circumstances that lean into discomfort, recognize spectra of experience, and explore what it means to face difficulty and find catharsis.
All the Flowers Kneeling approaches trauma closely and complexly. The poet elevates their words using multiple lenses. They approach trauma and the traumatic as utterly connected with identity and the currents of systemic and historic inequities, and yet there is the very personal that is centered even further. Tran does not hide their trans and Asian identities, and yet their work feels incredibly personally complex, minutely detailed through individualization and raw memory, arriving far from categories and large swaths of generalization.
I’ll surrender, I tell you,
when you detach from your received idea of purpose.
So you do. You set down your weapon.
But I didn’t mean the blade in your hand.
I meant the blade in your mind.
- From “Orchard of Knowing,” page 1
Their own lived experience takes the focal point: one’s individual experience as individual experience as represented by individual voice in individual poems. This creeping sense of balance between the personal and general reinforces the surreal and emphasizes fragments and dream states throughout the book. Running parallel to everything is the surge of the metaphor, which charges mood and provides a foundation, a consistency for Tran’s many themes to slowly emerge. A humble illumination peers out from between the folders of each stanza.
As much as the poems feel directed by and starring the poet, it’s hard to say how autobiographical each work. Instead the lucidity and abstraction present a cast of speakers, an array of voice, thought, and expression that feels collective yet humane in its fragmentation. The poet’s speakers explore their small worlds, the scenes and sequences through which trauma and healing can emerge, as they engage in and often open up through ethereal monologues. Grief, remorse, and multiple futures are structures through which discussion and reflection can occur.
My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld
underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothin.
- From “Bioluminescence,” page 16
But the speakers are never alone. As connected to Tran’s familial roots and history, namely their mother and father, so too are the speakers bound to family and a core set of intense relationships. The parents’ saga as refugees, moments of domestic violence, observations of this trauma and cooperative pondering—many poems are configured in the shadow of this long reality of the horrific. It makes for rough, brutal textures in the poetry, a poetry that finds itself awake following moments of rest, emerging through the peripherals, the liminal states of safety where inquiry is possible.
Occasionally there is concrete description that carries out story and interaction, but always there is a lingering sense of the blunt and deafening effects of violence and pain. This raises powerful questions around our sense of knowing and understanding, of moving through the fog to clarity, and how trauma is covered and how it is uncovered, and what it means to explore the line between these extremes. Poetry, as seen in Tran’s book, reveals one way we might engage trauma in a healing way, a safe way, a way protected with line breaks, stanzas, and linguistic structures.
In that room,
in that apartment—
my mother and father
became my mother and father
and, the next spring
for the first time,
brought me home
through that entryway
that was neither
a way in nor a way out
of that violence
that pounding
- From “Provenance,” page 22
All the Flowers Kneeling as a book occasionally feels disarrayed in its structure. At 29 poems in length, many of which are quite long, this is a collection that moves to many spaces and has much to explore. There are occasional movements of humor, occasional bursts of relief, and a lingering sense of elegance that grace the most tough of the subject matter. By the second cover, the book feels like a sigh of relief, but there it ends less with a period and more with a question mark. It is a book of questions, a book of curiosities: catharsis as process, catharsis as ellipses, catharsis as what is next?
The yearning for more of their poetry to emerge feels as much a dream as a curse, but one that is necessary—for the poet, for their speakers, for us, for our ongoing need to connect, understand, and grow through the lifelong, through the never-ending breath of reading.
Set on stage in my cage of the flesh, my cage of the mind, the performance rendered
Us captive. Captivated. I wanted the audience to see me. I wanted to see myself
Both as I was and as I wasn’t.
- From “I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us,” page 50
Greg Bem lived in Seattle for 13 years before moving to Spokane, where he has resided since 2023. He is a community college librarian and union organizer, small press publisher, poet and performer, and book reviewer, among other things. His reviews are linked on his website, and can be found published here in International Examiner as well as in Rain Taxi, North of Oxford, Exacting Clam, and Another Chicago Magazine.
