Back in 2022, I was lucky enough to be asked by Wayne Holloway Smith at the Poetry Review to review All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran, published by Penguin in the UK, and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen published by Bloodaxe in the UK.
Preparing to speak with Tamsin Hopkins about bird of winter, alongside new projects, for Red Door Poets on Sunday 30 November, (you can watch our conversation here) I’ve been thinking about art-making as a healing energy, and a source of agency that can generate transformative encounters between the maker and the work, and the work and the world. It made me realise how much I have received, and continue to receive from the voices around me, whether on the page, in person, or over the airwaves – as with the recent, riveting, brilliant documentary, Ladies First, about the first generations of Black African American women claiming their voices through Hip Hop.
Paul Tran and Chen Chen are two poets whose practice and fierce, sometimes fiercely funny, creativity inspires and informs my own. Ahead of my conversation with Tamsin, I wanted to share my review of how they define and document complex events that have been visited on them, their families and their wider communities, while simultaneously refusing to be defined or diminished by energies that had their origins in acts of intended harm. The text of the review follows:
Near to the end of All the Flowers Kneeling, a segment within Paul Tran’s long poem ‘SCHEHERAZADE/ SCHEHERAZADE’ reflects: “Reap. Pear. Pare. Aper./ These are versions of the word// I won’t say the word/ without which there’s no speaker.” Recognising and articulating this paradox is central to the work of change Tran’s poems perform. Defining, but refusing to be defined by, traumatic experiences is equally a live issue in Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. Audacious in their uses of form, and possessed of a fierce sense of mission, Tran’s and Chen’s new works have in common a doubled structure exploring overlapping generations of trauma. Compellingly readable, each collection also arrives at a new relationship with their core materials through a redemptive turn into the once rejected or diminished body-self.
Giving witness to two sexual assaults, and multiple historic acts of violence, Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling is nonetheless a freedom song. ‘Victim Report’, then later ‘Progress Report’, direct our path forward. The larger healing work is also shaped by the Buddhist tenet that nothing is fixed. Structured as four segments, the first part of Tran’s debut centres around “my death in that room without sunrise” on “the night before my twenty-first birthday”. It also holds a partial account of what happened to “my mother/on her knees” fleeing Vietnam as a young woman. “Her silence demanding mine” means neither adult-child nor parent can speak fully what was done to them:
My mother disappears whatever blights her the way she now makes her living: altering and tailoring the story
as though the truth were trousers to be hemmed.
Tran’s second segment opens with “my father”, who “lives alone”. He is similarly haunted by the Vietnam War. Driving his 93 Mazda MPV: “We sail I-15 South as though it’s Thu Bồn River,/ flee Hội An’s cinnamon forest barricade, viscera-flooded streets/ American soldiers peeling his house apart, straw by straw.” Formally recording the separate traumas which continue to entrap their parents, enables Tran’s voiced self to recreate on the page the place in which their own mind was caught. We the readers feel it with them: “the right hand placed over my mouth/ while the left hand held me, held me// there, held me down”. Refusing silence generates a shift into agency. ‘Winter’ retells the fable of a Buddhist monk and his mother which leads the speaker to understand that “She left me behind in// Hell, where I had to find a way to save us both.”
Transformation takes root through a Buddhist metaphor of rebirth within Tran’s third segment: “I had to keep on/ Remembering the desert wind, the flames that broke into and broke open// This body, that released from me another me, another”. These flames seem at first reading to be the sensations experienced when “A man seeded me without consent”. They become also the successive selves arising from living beyond this event, and the artworks these evolving selves make. Tran afterwards offers the image of a desert blooming “after decades dormant […] a sea of gold and pink and purple”.
The final segment begins with ‘Enlightenment. It reveals “I close my eyes to open them” and celebrates “coming/ back from the dead”, most gorgeously in the poem which gifts the collection its title. Named for California’s “desert wind”, ‘The Santa Ana’ rejoices in the full flamboyance of self-created, trans life:
How far we have travelled towards “sunrise” is registered in the same poem’s “Pop quiz: who’s that bitch?” The answer can only be: “That bitch,// bitch. That’s me/ looking at myself/ for the first time!” Queer gorgeousness as a radical, political act is also at the heart of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency. Written during Trump’s presidency – “endorsed/ by the KKK” – and the pandemic, Chen Chen’s second collection documents the double assault of coming of age in an America, some of whose citizens publicly denigrate Asian Americans, while at home your parents deny and endeavour to change your queerness.
Chen’s poems confront head on the fearfulness that living in a frequently hostile environment may exacerbate. ‘The School of Fury’ recalls “my father almost getting arrested for trying to retrieve his son” as a result of having gone to “the neighbor’s door”, rather than that of Chen’s friend, at the end of a play date. This occurred not long after the family had arrived from China, but such incidents are shown as continuing right up to the present day, and possibly contributing to the harshness with which Chen’s parents enforced what they perceived to be a protective conformity.
‘The School of Red’ recalls being “struck” on the face, aged fourteen by his mother, for saying “I think I like girls/ & boys”, and afterwards being told for many years “never” to tell his brothers, or any other family, about his queerness. ‘I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party’ is a brilliantly funny, and bitter-sweet, enactment of the slow process of change, and the deep family love that enables this. Chen does not turn away from how he likewise absorbed self-hostile beliefs. ‘Winter’ remembers “my first boyfriend” approving my “not really chinky eyes. The way I said, Thank you.” and “my third boyfriend, how he liked to call my dick an eggroll, proudly called himself a rice queen.”
What strengthens Chen to resist and make different are the qualities for which he was persecuted and diminished. From ‘Every Poem Is My Most Asian Poem,’ to multiple segments in untranslated Mandarin, to a celebration of his mother’s rocking a three-sweater-look, Chen affirms how where he hails from nourishes and roots him. Aesthetically as well as personally. Similarly, he shows how he writes out of the life-givingness of queerness, and his committed partnership to “my Jeff, who fixes the computer, who fixes us dinner, fucks my face et mon ȃme”.
Sounding a note of jubilant defiance, ‘Ode to ReReading Rimbaud in Lubbock, Texas’ plays out “my poetics of deepthroat & tonguefuck”. Their chant is “Let’s holler, troublemongers. In the/ lick of many summers”. The last poem is ‘The School of Joy’. It closes the collection with Chen’s hand refusing exclusion and making instead
