You Will Always Be Someone from Somewhere Else

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Art. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen. Dao Strom's YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình s? luôn là ng i n? n t? n?i n?, is a collection and is a re-collection, a "re-membering". Caressing the fault lines of history and self, the book locates fragments and rubs them into their own wholeness. As when a camera lens zooms in, images of "memory's memories" come into focus as story. And as the lens continues to zoom, the story ruptures back into words, punctuation, slices drifting in empty space. And you are aware that you are implicated, that your act of reading is involved in the continuation and the erasure of memories that do not "belong" to you, as mythologies are created, as echoes of knowledge are passed on across time and distance. Dao Strom's book contains this instruction, explicitly named and repeatedly misspelled: "teach them woh to read us, teach meht how to read us, hcaet them how to read us, teach them how to read su." Calling to mind Edmond Jabès' "shattered writing," a shard of broken glass reflects the absent clouds and reflects the whole sky. Each piece of letter mirrors the eyes and hearts of the writer, as you, as someone else. Teach us. How to make something v?, something broken, something shattered be beautiful? YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, where you are.

About the Author :
Dao Strom is a writer, musician, and artist based in the diaspora. She is the author of YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE (2018) as well as a hybrid-forms memoir, WE WERE MEANT TO BE A GENTLE PEOPLE, and a music album, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. She is the editor of diaCRITICS, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Ly Thuy Nguyen is that hybrid Viet youngster with different realities in different cities. On a good day, she is finishing her PhD in San Diego, California. Her research is on the personal and the political of human geographic stories, interAsian connections and global queer futurity. On a better day, she is translating some interesting and important works--there are more to come. On any given day, she is figuring out her complicated relationship to poetry and life.