A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS

Available May 14, 2024

 A Mouth Holds Many Things collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media.

At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? Lifting language beyond the domain of the letter, the works collected here present language in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile. Language, after all, is multi-textu(r)al, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities.

A project of the Portland-based literary-social art project, De-Canon, which creates unique spaces and experiments to center works by writers of color, this collection is edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.

Contributors: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Aya Bram, Victoria Chang, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Monica Ong, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Alley Pezanoski-Browne, Kelly Puig, Ayesha Raees, Jhani Randhawa, Paisley Rekdal, Daisuke Shen, Sasha Stiles, Sandy Tanaka, Arianne True, Addie Tsai, Vauhini Vara, Divya Victor, Anna Martine Whitehead, Kathy Wu

See our complete index of artists here (coming soon)

A group art exhibition of A Mouth Holds Many Things featuring works from the anthology will be hosted at Stelo Arts, a community art space and gallery in downtown Portland, Ore., from June 6-July 28, 2024.

Support for the publication and exhibit of A Mouth Holds Many Things was generously provided by the Oregon Community Foundation, the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), and a re/source residency fellowship from the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC).

Art/Literature/Poetry
Paperback/Perfect Bound
7.25” x 9.25”
363 pp
ISBN: 979-8-9875890-3-8

About the Editors

Dao Strom (she/her) is a poet, musician, writer, and multimedia artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of several hybrid works, including the poetry-art collection Instrument (2020), which won the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode, her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, and others; she is also the author of two books of fiction. In 2017 Dao co-founded De-Canon as a literary art and social engagement “pop-up library” project to center works by writers of color. She is a founding member of the Vietnamese women and nonbinary artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). Born in Vietnam, she grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Jyothi Natarajan (she/they) is an editor, writer, and cultural worker and has collaborated with Dao Strom as part of De-Canon since 2021. She spent nearly a decade working at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she edited the digital literary magazine The Margins and helped to establish The Margins Fellowship for emerging writers. Jyothi now works as Program Manager at Haymarket Books, where they administer a fellowship program for writers impacted by carceral systems. They are the recipient of the 2017 Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts and, with Dao, are part of the 2023-24 IPRC re/source residency. Having grown up in Southern Virginia, Jyothi is now based out of Portland, Oregon.