Dao Strom w/ Jennifer (JP) Perrine & Stephanie Adams-Santos, YELLOW SONGS

Multidisciplinary artist Dao Strom presents her new project Yellow Songs, a set of four books set fifty years after the fall of Saigon, which vibrate with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Published by The 3rd Thing Press, the books of Yellow Songs reckon with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. She is joined by fellow writers and artists Jennifer Perrine and Stephanie Adams-Santos.

A hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera, the Tender Revolutions album (available here) and each of the four Yellow Songs books reckon with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Tender Revolutions / Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision.

The books will be available for purchase as a set or as individual volumes at the event.

Each of the four slender Yellow Songs volumes:

• Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie’s “China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.
• Yellow Songs 2: We [/] Breathe is a polyvocal, poetic collaboration with the She Who Has No Master(s) collective. Exploring embodiments of harmony, dissonance, resonance, light, shadow, and yellow, this collection reclaims the Asian feminine figure from Western representations and narratives, giving shape and color to utterance and song, giving voice to lived experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora.
• Yellow Songs 3: Postwar Tablefruit folds words, metaphor, memory and the body into a kaleidoscopic meditation on moments of unresolvable dissonance. “Microaggressions” are synthesized into darkly suggestive mandala-like images and layered poems that confound resolution or any singular reading.
• Yellow Songs 4: Motherwound is a book-length poem that turns personal and national myths over and over like stones at the edge of the sea, tumbling I, you, and she together in the ebb and flood of generations and family relationships.
• Tender Revolutions is a fluid album, existing between genres—part ambient folk, part sound collage, part spoken word, part post rock—it blurs the line between the work of an experimental composer and the work of an accomplished singer-songwriter.

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid works, including the music-literary projects Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs (2025) and Instrument/Traveler’s Ode (2020), as well as two books of fiction. She co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. Born in Vietnam, Strom lives in Portland, Oregon. Website: daostrom.com / IG: @herandthesea

Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of five books of poetry: Beautiful Outlaw, Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. A two-time winner of Arts and Culture Diversity and Inclusion Awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, JP lives in Portland, Oregon, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series. Website: https://www.jenniferperrine.org/ IG: @JenniferPerrineWrites

Stephanie Adams-Santos is a multidisciplinary artist working in poetry, screenwriting, and illustration. They are the author of Dream of Xibalba (selected by Jericho Brown for the Orison Poetry Prize and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award). They have written for film, radio, and television, including Two Sentence Horror Stories on Netflix, and Nocturno—a Latin-American horror podcast hosted by Danny Trejo. Currently, Stephanie is developing Ojo de la Selva—an animist tarot deck attuned to ancestral and ecological memory. Website: http://www.obscurobeach.com/about.html IG: @tarot_obscuro

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