All the Flowers Kneeling

In “Bioluminiscence,” from Paul Tran’s radiant debut collection All the Flowers Kneeling, the speaker turns the self-generating light of the lanternfish and other creatures of the deep—“hideous like myself”—into a vision of their own self in transformation from youth to adulthood, otherness to wholeness, and nothingness to the substance of art and wisdom. Tran is brilliant at evoking the ways in which the strata of selfhood illuminate one another even when, like pentimento or palimpsest, they occlude one’s line of vision, as when the speaker in “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” observes how their mother “changes and is changed by how / she tells her story. There is no truth. Only a version. Aversion. A verge. A vengeance.” 

 “Scheherazade/Scheherazade” and another mesmerizing, multi-part poem, “I See Not Stars But Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us,” articulate, revise, and juxtapose the tales that compose Tran’s identity: Vietnamese parents exiled by the American war, remnants of Buddhist faith, landscapes harried by fiery Santa Ana winds, coming of age as transgender and queer, and the speaker’s attraction to men who are, by turns, gods, masters, and perpetrators of unspeakable violations:

Reap. Pear. Pare. Aper. 
These are versions of the word 
I won’t say. The word 
without which there’s no speaker.

If the conviction that poetry is the only safeguard against the abyss underlies the sometimes excruciating power of these poems, Tran is aware of the risk inherent in such reliance: “I want a life that can’t be corrected // by my imagination.” And if the struggle remains, as in “Copernicus,” a youthful one of thinking oneself “my own geocentric planet / spinning like a ballerina, alone at the center of the universe,” Tran’s poetry finds its desideratum in the eternal pursuit of self-transcendence, like that of the Paleolithic artists who hiked into “The Cave”:

Someone continued. They followed the idea so far inside that 
outside became another idea.