A Mouth Holds Many Things – Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, eds.

[Fonograf Editions; 2024]

To best understand A Mouth Holds Many Things, Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan’s groundbreaking project published in collaboration with De-Canon and Fonograf Editions in 2024, it might make the most sense to clarify first what it is not.

Though it carefully collates hybrid-literary works by thirty-six women and nonbinary BIPOC writers, for instance, A Mouth is not strictly an anthology. Rather than presenting an exhaustive or introductory survey of hybrid-literary works, the editors describe A Mouth in their Editor’s Note as “just one gathering of hybrid makers,” such that moving from one installment to the next feels more like wandering through an intimate art exhibition or shaking hands at a dinner party.

Though each work of experimental poetry, prose, image-text, and otherwise considers language its primary material, A Mouth is not exclusively literary—in fact, thumbing through its pages feels more like skimming an art mag or a multi-media zine than one might expect from a collection of hybrid literature. While language remains A Mouth’s unifying throughline, each writer seems to deploy it in a radically visual way.

Even when it comes to the project’s most fundamental descriptor—“hybrid-literary”—the editors are careful to clarify that they only mean to use “hybrid” as a starting point when “bringing into question the very parameters and shapes such letters and marks are generally expected to follow in order to be understood; to be deemed legible.” Indeed, at the heart of this project is a clear and successful commitment to the abolition of any “reliance on canonical thinking, canonical measures and validations and examples, as guideposts,” as Strom writes in her Foreword.

After spending several hours with this book, I can confirm that these qualifiers aren’t just theoretical fluff, either. A Mouth has not argued for a kind of radical change it was not itself willing to practice; instead, it has collected and published writers whose works are as boldly experimental and diverse as the project itself. In this way, A Mouth has paved the way for future collections to follow—not, to be clear, by way of some alternative canon, but in a freshly de-canonized publishing universe, wherein works are able to discover a readership on the merits of their ingenuity and strangeness, rather than merely because they contribute or respond to whatever host of works precede them. At each turn of the page, A Mouth breathes new life into the world.

In Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Eclipses,” for example, Nguyen superimposes the shape—or perhaps the shadow—of a family portrait directly in the center of the page, which complicates the experience of reading her prose poem. Were this a traditional poem, I might have started right into the text, reading the poem from beginning to end, but Nguyen’s use of collage to cover up certain words and interrupt the reading experience forced me to pause and take a step back. Almost immediately, I realized I would need to change the way I was reading, in order to properly understand the work. In this way, “Eclipses” isn’t just a poem; it’s more of an embodied experience. Since the text explores the ways remembering loss is itself complicated (e.g., “I try to conjure him and he’s back why conjure then at all but to listen for his arrival in the hum of his departure”), Nguyen’s use of collage magnifies the effect of the theme of her poem so that it does more than jump off the page. It challenges me, as a reader, to stop reading.

Many of the works in A Mouth produced a similar effect. It was almost as if, each time I felt I had an idea of what “hybrid-literary” might mean, A Mouth introduced me to an artist who shattered that idea.

For example, by layering several layers of the same text on top of itself, Carolina Ebeid’s “Voice Becoming Artifact” found a way, dizzyingly, to reproduce the feeling of trying to remember the sound of a person’s voice, “many a voice of a mother / melted down in a landfill some time now.” By printing the second half of a work upside down, the prose poem from writer collective desveladas—comprised of poet Sheila Maldonado, journalist Macarena Hernández, and writer Nelly Rosario—titled “Atabey + Caney,” visualizes the circularity of life in the universe. Indeed, to read the entirety of the poem, I must either rotate the book 180º or tilt my head wildly. To solidify this, the collective argues, “If you must teach: Learn from and in all cardinal directions for the strength to hold up the sky.”

At every turn, the editors pulled at the threads of the history and tradition of hybrid literature as we know it—all in the name of the BIPOC women and nonbinary writers living “on the far peripheries, those both gender- and race-marginalized . . . because there is no predetermined literary lineage that has effectively spoken to or welcomed them.” To put it plainly, where the canon has been silent, A Mouth speaks.

The moment I finished Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s essay-length prose poem, “Masked Force: Võ An Khánh’s Wartime Photographs,” for example, which offers vivid essay-length ekphrastic meditations on historical photographs from 1960s Việt Nam, I turned the page to read Alley Pezanoski-Browne’s much briefer poetry and collage work, “Eve,” which mourns the countless Black women whose lives and legacies have been erased by slavery. Both stories look to images from history to consider the ways those in power have used violence as a force to marginalize and control; and yet, both writers go about doing so in radically different ways.

While reading the first felt like a more familiar experience, as if flipping through the pages of a textbook, reading the second impacted me on a different, much deeper level. At the center of a blurry photograph, white text against black page fills the void where the face and neck of a Black woman once were, reading “she lives in / she becomes / his legacy.” 

Whereas Samiya Rashir’s “Field Theories -Four-” weaves together text and portraits taken at Harlem Hospital to explore the relationship between Black bodies and the medical-industrial complex, Gabrielle Civil’s *anemone combines poetry and performance to comment on the fetishization of Black bodies and the suppression of Black women’s sexuality. Two very different mediums, united by language, exploding off the page in distinct directions. By offering several different avenues to explore related themes and concepts, A Mouth demonstrates the importance of diversity of form, proving the point that, in the same way no collection of works could represent a single genre, neither could a single work represent a concept.

At its core, the aim of A Mouth seems to be to demonstrate the countless shapes and colors and sounds language can become once it is removed from its container. Just as “a river sends tributaries—many mouths—to the sea,” Strom writes, outside the literary canon, the possibilities of hybrid literatures are endless. In A Mouth, they take on “defiant new shapes—unruly, unprecedented,” as the editors note. But what the contents of A Mouth amount to, in the end, is clearly not the point. This way of thinking about hybridity suggests that the possibilities are, by definition, endless.

With the Portland-based social-practice/art project, De-Canon, and nonprofit publishing house, Fonograf Editions, behind them, editors Strom and Natarajan have offered the literary community something as radical as it is effective. For every rule A Mouth breaks, it has created a space for literatures that were not previously allowed to exist on the basis of those rules. What the publishing community might have previously deemed unpublishable, A Mouth has boldly printed—not just for the sake of the freedom of the press, but to rewrite the definition of what is considered literature and what is not, from the inside out.

As the editors themselves note, “How and what one reads is inextricably shaped by the literature that is published.” In other words, if it isn’t in print, people aren’t likely to know it’s been written. But simply printing words and images isn’t enough, either. They continue: “It’s hard not to overstate what an uphill journey it is for writers of hybrid literature when it comes to growing an audience and distributing their work.”

With all this said, while A Mouth is neither an anthology nor conventionally hybrid nor exclusively literary—it is pioneering. It is strange, it is new, and, as Monica Ong wrote in her poem, “Indigo Insomnia,” it is “still forming between the lungs.”

Justin Duyao (he/him) is a contributing editor at HereIn Journal. As a San Diego–based writer, he is the recipient of a Make | Learn | Build grant from Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as a writing fellowship from the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA. His writing has been published by the Financial Times, Southwest Contemporary, Clackamas Literary Review, and the Northwest Review, among others. He lives in San Diego, California.