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. She is joined by fellow writers and artists Jennifer Perrine and Stephanie Adams-Santos.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you'd like to RSVP, please do so here!

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

Event Info Here

A POLYVOCAL CELEBRATION FOR YELLOW SONGS

Showcasing poetry as a multimodal, multi-voice, social engagement, this event will feature hybrid readings/performances from contributors to A Mouth Holds Many Things alongside poetry and music from Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs. An installation of “listening/reading stations” and an altar of book objects will precede the live event, allowing audience to engage more fully with the works prior to the event, which will then activate the installation space.

Featuring Portland and Seattle-based hybrid writers/artists: Dao Strom, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Aya Bram, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Sandy Tanaka.

Tender Revolutions/Yellow Song is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera by Portland-based Dao Strom, that tend to “yellow subjectivities” and enacting small spaces of connectivity across boundaries of diaspora and identity. Published by The 3rd Thing Press, Beacon Sound, Antiquated Future Records.

A Mouth Holds Many Things is a collection of hybrid-literary works by 36 BIPOC women and nonbinary writers, co-edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan as a collective project of De-Canon and Fonograf Editions.

Event: Jan 31, 2026, 7PM/6:30 doors
Free event or $5-$15 donations

Installation Open Jan 19-31st / gallery hours: Th, F, Sat 4-7pm 

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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.

Aya Bram is a poet and artist who works around the betweens, the heres and theres, the material and the unseen. Their work is published both online -- Concision Poetry, Night Music Journal, Dream Pop -- and in print -- A Mouth Holds Many Things -- but mostly exists stitched into quilts and folded up on papers, dispersed to friends and strangers around Seattle.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of 13 books, including Less Desolate (Blue Cactus, 2024) and No Neutral (Empty Bowl, 2023). She is the creator and host of Ten Thousand Things, a podcast on Asian American stories that she produced for three seasons with KUOW Public Radio and now makes independently with Wonder Media Network. Shin Yu served as Civic Poet of The City of Seattle from 2023-2024 and is the former Poet Laureate of The City of Redmond. 

Jenne Hsien Patrick is a poet, writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Tacoma, WA. They are currently at work on "Mamalaohu," a RISOgraph micropress focused on the intersection of text, image, and the senses. Jenne is a Hugo House Fellow, a Tin House Workshop alum, and their writing, comics, and hybrid image/text work has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Northwest, AAWW/The Margins, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.

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.

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 the music/literary projects Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs (2025) and Instrument/Traveler’s Ode (2020), among other hybrid works. She is the co-editor of A Mouth Holds Many Things, a hybrid-literary collection, and the co-founder of two collective art projects, De-Canon and She Who Has No Master(s). Born in Vietnam, Strom lives in Portland, Oregon.

Sandy Tanaka is a writer, artist, and designer. She has been working in the comics industry for ten years. Before that, she was an art director, music supervisor, and band manager in Los Angeles. She has a B.A. in film from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. In 2021, she received the Oregon Literary Career Fellowship. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.