A National Poetry Month conversation with Paul Tran, author of ‘All the Flowers Kneeling’

(The Seattle Times): Paul Tran’s debut full-length poetry collection, “All the Flowers Kneeling” (Penguin Books, 2022), just dropped in February, but their poetry stretches beyond that slim and beautiful volume. They are immersed in the poetry world, serving as the poetry editor at The Offing magazine, a visiting faculty in poetry at Pacific University and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, in addition to numerous awards and fellowships. Tran’s work threads together the corporeal and the cultural, history and future, the intimacies and violences of life in a world shaped by colonization, imperialism, war, misogyny, patriarchy and, blooming somewhere in the middle, resilience, resistance, growth and love. The child of Vietnamese refugees and a survivor of sexual abuse and assault, Tran writes out of these experiences with candor and erudite creativity. They both incorporate and subvert their Western education (which includes a Bachelor of Arts in history and an Master of Fine Arts in poetry) and their wider exploration of art from across the world.