Mixing essay, poetry, myth, collage, and photography, Yellow Songs is an expansive and breathtaking work. The four book set can be read/purchased as a whole or individually and they each work in conversation with the Tender Revolutions album.

From the publisher: Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Tender Revolutions / Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. A hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera, the Tender Revolutions album 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. 

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.

Published by The 3rd Thing, in collaboration with Antiquated Future and Beacon Sound.