Dao Strom

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. Music. 175 pages long, Dao Strom's INSTRUMENT is an experiment in multimodal poetics-inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist's three forms of voice. Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom's life and work speaks to fragmentation-of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places-yet within this configuring lies her art's fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography and gripping, restless poetry, INSTRUMENT represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler's Ode, of ambient and folk-tinged songs featuring ethereal assemblages of sung-poetry, vocal layering, spare guitar and piano, and field sounds from sources such as rivers, sea, jungle, birds. Traveler's Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and Antiquated Future.

Instrument

"A memoir in text, image, and song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath" --

A Memoir in Text + Image (+ Song)

We Were Meant to be a Gentle People

In 1975, Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, flees her homeland with her two children and seeks refuge in the West, where she marries a Danish-American man with his own memories of another war, in a sensitive debut novel about the impact of cultural displacement. A first novel. Original.

Grass Roof, Tin Roof

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Art. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen. Dao Strom's YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình s? luôn là ng??i n? ??n t? n?i n?, is a collection and is a re-collection, a "re-membering". Caressing the fault lines of history and self, the book locates fragments and rubs them into their own wholeness. As when a camera lens zooms in, images of "memory's memories" come into focus as story. And as the lens continues to zoom, the story ruptures back into words, punctuation, slices drifting in empty space. And you are aware that you are implicated, that your act of reading is involved in the continuation and the erasure of memories that do not "belong" to you, as mythologies are created, as echoes of knowledge are passed on across time and distance. Dao Strom's book contains this instruction, explicitly named and repeatedly misspelled: "teach them woh to read us, teach meht how to read us, hcaet them how to read us, teach them how to read su." Calling to mind Edmond Jabès' "shattered writing," a shard of broken glass reflects the absent clouds and reflects the whole sky. Each piece of letter mirrors the eyes and hearts of the writer, as you, as someone else. Teach us. How to make something v?, something broken, something shattered be beautiful? YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, where you are.

You Will Always Be Someone from Somewhere Else

Jyothi Natarajan

A ground breaking anthology that collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists, A Mouth Holds Many Things is the first book of its kind.

A De-Canon Hybrid Literary Anthology

A Mouth Holds Many Things

Stories

The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys

In a portrait of the rites of female passage, a collection of short fiction journeys from girlhood and young womanhood to marriage and motherhood, capturing the lives of four young women dealing with the challenges of relationships.

Four Stories

"The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen–seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle–class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." —The New Yorker When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage.

Dao Strom

About

Books

Join the club