Instrument - Paperback

by Dao Strom (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.