If You Like Shades of Lipstick, Caves and Dungeons, and Groundbreaking Florals
All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran
VIOLETS’ PICKS 008
Where I found it
Propped up by its many accolades, including a nod on New Yorker’s list of 2022 Books of the Year, I picked it up out of a list somewhere I found on the internet simply because I liked the title; I’m a sucker for flowers. Literally, metaphorically, poetically, viscerally. As emblems of love, life, and nature, they’re a natural target for poetry. Thus, Violets. Thus, All the Flowers Kneeling: Flowers, with the kind of title in context that I can’t help but be attracted to, something beyond the elementary rendition of flowers we’re so used to seeing. Give me flowers that mean more than nice and sweet things. Give me flowers all dramatic and flamboyant and powerful. Give me flowers in all their glory and tragedy. A kneel, like a pop star’s final breath as they slide down on their knees, look up into the air, and the crowd goes wild. Or a kneel, like a prayer to a some far away force in the universe to come by and beam you out of here.
First impressions
Ever watched a movie, thought it was nice and all, but didn’t really think much of it until you conduct a post-watch investigation? And then you read about all the other things people picked up, the things you didn’t notice, and the movie you were ready to file into “good but forgettable” becomes sticky? You might not rate it any better, but it stays with you. That’s something I’ve been experiencing and thinking about more now: the lasting impression.
One of the perks of writing a newsletter sharing poetry recommendations is this process, the act of taking myself on an adventure that starts off with a relatively blank slate, dives into the pure pleasure of words and textures held within the experience of reading poetry, and then ends up coloured by the beauty of the internet, its many crawling webs and echoing voices holding interpretations and impressions, interviews pulling you deeper into someone’s world and their process.
I’ve sometimes thought about the idea that good art doesn’t need explanation. I wholly disagree. Discourse has led me to living experiences much more fully, often after the “experience” is complete. I feel like this is more often the case with poetry, where I’m still trying to detach from lifelong conditioning to derive meaning from everything. But what does this mean? My process is starting to look more like this: experience it, then hop onto the Internet rabbit hole to learn from the experiences of others because apparently, I’m not that deep. But I love being pulled in. I adore this feeling of having my own experience be confirmed, or augmented, coloured, even rejected and rewired. This is what the internet is made for.
I don’t want to say more but I think this is a book that benefits from a good ole fashioned internet deep dive post-read.
They said it
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?
-From the publisher
Wielding poetic form and language as weapon and wound, Tran transmogrifies the grotesque to the gorgeous, the victim to the victor, the oppressed to the liberated. At the center of this particular labyrinth is a monster with its bloody heart exposed and whose true face is one of the most powerful thing that ultimately redeems our humanity: love.
-From Angela María Spring for Electric Literature
A line to remember
What humiliated me As I read, lived my death in that room without sunrise Wasn’t my desire for light, but my desire for more darkness -From “Scheherazade/Scheherazade“
They followed the idea so far inside that outside became another idea. -From “The Cave”
There’s a difference between letting go and setting free. -From “The First Law of Motion”
By my own Invention, I found a way. I’m no artifact. Between art and fact: I. -From “The Hydra”
You might like this if…
You are a visual artist, or an artist of any kind who enjoys adventuring through form—as in, how something is presented is as much part of the experience as what is said. You love stories and myths—1001 Nights, Dante’s Inferno, journeys through the dark. You understand what it’s like to feel trapped, and want so badly to experience art that makes you feel free, that honours the journey, dark as it was, to get there. When you hear the line “all the flowers kneeling”, you see and you feel in your body and mind what that could mean. When you buy lip colours, you make a thing out of the names of the shades—and have bought a colour simply because the name called to your soul. You are a survivor. You like mazes and puzzles and spirals and curveballs.
This was the colour of…
Darkness, like the crevasses of caves and shadows of dungeons. Sprinkle a dash of drama—golds, reds, purples, and pinks—tiny relics of dreams and pins en route to memory but never so blinding that you ever really forget that you’re still crawling and not yet flying.
Details
Year: 2022
Author: Paul Tran, who, because they were the first person in their family to learn English, discovered they naturally saw words within words (like love inside violence and lie inside believe)—which came in handy when they became a poet
Location: ? → Providence, Rhode Island → St. Louis, Missouri → Madison, Wisconsin
Publisher: Penguin Randomhouse
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
