INSTRUMENT / TRAVELER’S ODE


++ Winner of the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry ++

Dao Strom’s Instrument/Traveler’s Ode 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, an interwoven series of textured, ethereal song-poems. Atmospheric yet weighted, minimalist yet lush, the album combines voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores themes of displacement, diaspora, and hauntings.

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Instrument with Traveler’s Ode is a collaborative print book publication + cassette album release of Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records. Book and cassette can be purchased separately and/or together at both publisher and label websites.

Traveler’s Ode can be streamed/purchased on AF’s Bandcamp, Spotify, and other online music platforms.

Instrument can be purchased from Fonograf Editions, SPD Books, and select independent booksellers such as Powell’s and Elliott Bay Book Company.

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The book launch + album release of Instrument/Traveler’s Ode was celebrated with an online performance and a video + sound installation hosted by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) as part of their Time-Based Art Festival 2020.

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Poetry/Literary Nonfiction/Asian & Asian American Studies/Women's Studies/Art
Paperback: 167 pages
ISBN: 978-1-73445-662-2

(Release date: Nov 3, 2020-Book)
(Release date: Sept 26, 2020-Album)

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“Tender and sapient, polytextual and hypnotic, Dao Strom’s magnificent Instrument is a lexical voice box made of a thousand sonic ghosts, each of its echoes sits and waits at the intersection between sound and image, to be a yellow dress. Here she asks language and her Vietnamese past for its echo and its nudity: for a thought to find its cavernous voice, for a photograph of a photograph for its meta history with Camera Lucida, for a naked girl lit on fire by war to remember the photographer, for a dead bird to thaw out itself and its nival winter coat, and for a naked intruder to reveal himself as her post-lexical flower. Dao Strom inserts time and flight into her acutely attentive art and out comes a mouth or two made of flower and stone and from such penetrating rock-hard ephemerality, the catalyst for mother, dreams in Vietnamese, airport, ghost, banana, leaf, trauma, exodus, nước, as in country. Her music-torn, multi-textual, multi-vocal, genre-bending work is an exquisite compendium of pre- and post-war memories and moments, a magnificent palace of diction and intuition where her sonic soul begs the most obvious question, ‘Is the moon refugee like me?’ Both expansive and nano, Dao Strom’s Instrument is a type of reverse-engineered instrument in itself, capable of spotifying the reader’s and listener’s soul with the kind of tender, compassionate voyage that a sightseeing body with one foot in one country and the other dipped in the postmodern penmanship of memory could possibly roam. A DJ of sound, text, and image, Dao Strom is the Avicii of modern reality: pioneering image and sound in a way that evades incarnation and archetype and, ultimately, invites a type of singing called soul echolocation.” —Vi Khi Nao

"With Instrument, Dao Strom tunes her three voices (of song, of text, of visuals) to play a multimodal symphony that traverses through the spaces of body, time, and histories personal, familial and transnational. Repetitions appear as refrains, as echoes, textual ghosts who remind us of the past, who can guide us to the future. With and through photography, poems, lyrical prose, and visual work in the veins of Susan Howe, Anne Carson, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Strom weaves together the fragmentation of lives and places in order to reveal unseen fractures existent between parent and child, generations, stranger and traveler. Strom's voices that those of a virtuoso, moving between cultures and moments unforgotten. And what she orchestrates is elemental, essential. She begins ‘by extracting water out of the rock.’" —Diana Khoi Nguyen

“Both visual and sonic, Dao Strom’s Instrument constructs with dissolve, holds space for narrative, memory, declaration, and song. With images tender, familiar, and strange, we find ourselves held in the spaces where language or narrative fails. Transmuting the personal and historical amid brackets, talismanic twists, photographic sequences, fragments and verse, Instrument enacts a poetics of arrival and decrial. Haunting and elemental, evocative and necessary.” —Hoa Nguyen


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TRAVELER’S ODE TRACKLIST :

1. traveler’s ode

2. [interim]

3. [i stayed]

4. i have traveled

5. activator

6. wading into a new decade (…) forty-five years after the exodus

7. carry/catalyst I

8. carry/catalyst II

9. re-membering

PROCESS/Conversations :

EXCERPTS :