“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker “Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Gorgeous ... intense ... shimmering ... [an] unforgettable collection' Observer 'Beautiful, sensuous and plural ... a vital and visceral collection. Breathtaking' Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto & Othered Poems 'Brave ... this striking collection ... articulates the unspeakable from various angles ... often nightmarish and dark, there are moments of shimmering release ... an auspicious debut' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times '[A] powerful debut ... marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty' The New York Times Book Review 'Vivid ... searingly honest, beautifully told depictions of survival and self-love' Publishers Weekly 'A testament to queer self-love ... a monument to [what] persists' them.us 'A true masterwork ... an exquisitely crafted labyrinth of a book' Electric Literature This is a book about survival. This is a book about love. 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? These rich, resonant poems of desire, freedom, control and rebirth reach back into the past - the tale of Scheherazade, US imperial violence, a shattering history of personal abuse - to show how it both scars and transforms. Innovative poetic forms mirror the nonlinear experiences of trauma survivors, while ambitious sequences probe our systems of knowledge-making and the power of storytelling as survival. At once virtuosic and vulnerable, confessional and profoundly defiant, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacities for resilience, endurance and love.

Season 15 winner of America's Got Talent, Brandon Leake, presents his debut poetry collection. Brandon is the first spoken word poet to compete on AGT and to receive the Golden Buzzer award in the first round, going on to win the entire competition! From famous spoken word poet, artistic educator, and founder/CEO of “Called to Move” Brandon Leake comes his debut poetry collection Unraveling. In an era of self love, the ability to love oneself is only as effective as the ability to know oneself. Throughout his collection, Leake asks readers to look at something beautiful, yet still see its flaws. On the flip side, he encourages readers to look at something evil, and yet still see the beauty it holds. Universally relatable, surprisingly educational, and all around powerful, Unraveling is a collection of poetry inspiring us to slow down, breathe, and read between the lines.

NOT FLOWERS is a collection of quiet juxtapositions: the wonder and loneliness of childhood, the magic and loss of places left behind, the resilience and imperfection of the love we give each other. More than anything, these poems are an attempt to write toward joy, toward futures in which we buy flowers for ourselves. Poetry.

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.