All the Flowers Kneeling

This much-anticipated debut from Tran (the first Asian American since 1993 and the first transgender poet ever to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam) investigates American imperialism, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of trauma recovery. The multi-part poem “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” explores the idea that in order to survive, victims must tell the story of their survival, and the poems here relating these stories are breathtaking, thought-provoking, and fearlessly honest, encapsulating tumultuous lows that will make readers shudder. In “Galileo,” the speaker says, “I, too, had been taken apart./ I didn’t want to be/fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless/ like me.” While this pain is vividly captured, there is also an undercurrent of strength and perseverance within the voices, as evidenced in “Bioluminescence”: “So far below, so far/ away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby/ dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed./ I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay/ alive.”