Instrument

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.