Paul Tran, _All the Flowers Kneeling_

THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION on the back cover calls All the Flowers Standing "a profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse," and as publishers' descriptions go, that one is uncannily on the money.

Tran juxtaposes his mother's experience as refugee from Vietnam with the sexual assault he himself lived through when what seems to have been a relatively ordinary sexual encounter took a terrible turn (or so I am interpreting--it seemed comparable to the story told by Édouard Louis in Une histoire de la violence.)

This intersection of personal trauma and historical trauma, it occurred to me,  appears elsewhere in Vietnamese-American literature. Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Diana Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer all deal in intimate trauma multiplied by the devastations of colonialism. 

Hardly surprising, given Vietnam's history and the USA's role in that history, but it got me thinking. Other instances of personal trauma intersecting with historical trauma come quickly to mind.

Given that Japan was for many years a colonizing presence in Korea, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko might serve as an additional example, or Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony.

Tommy Orange's novels could serve as examples, too, even though the colonizing mainly occurred generations ago; Wandering Stars in particular suggests a kind of subterranean connection between the violent empire-building of a hundred and fifty years ago and psychological instability in the present. Then think of the relatively recent books reflecting the long-term reverberations in the present of enslavement in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming and Roger Reeves's Best Barbarian could start a long, long list.

That's what we see if we zoom out. If we zoom in, we see that Tran is an extraordinarily deft and fluent poet. The publisher's copy gestures in this direction ("innovative poetic forms") but definitely seems more interested in the psychological or therapeutic ("rediscovering and reconfiguring  the self").

But consider the sequence at the collection's center, "I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us." Each of the sequence's thirteen sections has thirteen lines (a truncated sonnet that Tran dubs a "Hydra"), the thirteenth line always having thirteen words. Then too, "The first word of the last line in section X becomes the first word of the first line in section Y," as Tran explains in the notes at the end of the book, and there are additional constraints as well. 

That Tran imposed upon himself a fiendishly byzantine set of rules and further indulged himself in any amount of verbal jonglerie (e.g., "Seeded? Yes, Like a plot. Ceded? Absolutely not") yet still produced a confession/accusation/self-examination so fearful and fierce, so near the bone even as it aims for transcendence...well. It's quite a poem. Tran seems to be both a writer of his cultural-historical moment and a very distinctive poet of Merrill-like versatility.