Instrument - by Dao Strom (Paperback)

About the Book

"Dao Strom's Instrument continues the author's virtuosic exploration of identity, selfhood and refusal-of stasis, of forgetting, of falsity. The book furthers creative and historical material Strom first explored in her books You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else and We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People while simultaneously exploring new directions, modes and fragments... ."--Publisher's website (viewed March 23, 2021).

Book Synopsis

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, piano, and field recordings. Traveler's Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and Antiquated Future.

Review Quotes

"...Strom mixes photography, pages of collaged text a la Susan Howe, travelogue, and lyric rumination bringing various elements from out the pageantry of performance art to bear upon the book format...The writing undertakes to articulate as well as overcome unavoidable intrusions of past events, necessitating participatory awareness of poet and reader, from confronting injustice to bringing solace or simply managing maintain the moment's insight into self."-- "periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics"

"Vietnamese-American artist Dao Strom has created an all-encompassing experience with her poetry work Instrument, which is accompanied by its companion piece, an album by the name of Traveler's Ode. Within, there is an exploration of history, legacy, nature, of trauma both personal and generational, and the interwoven story of a member of a diaspora traveling back to a so-called homeland. Though what this actually means and how it plays out is investigated and dissected throughout."--Mark Horiuchi "International Examiner"

About the Author

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three "voices"--written, sung, visual--to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.