In June 2024, we released the print book A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions and De-Canon, 2024) and opened the accompanying group art exhibition A Mouth Holds Many Things at Stelo Arts in downtown Portland, Oregon.
A Mouth Holds Many Things is a book, an exhibition, a website, and a literary-social-art experiment that seeks to create a space for a type of literature—a literary art—straining against and splitting the seams of its textual confinements, that spills messily across borderlines into other art domains, that by its very nature resists containment. The hybrid-literary exists because it cannot be relegated to, is not at home within, any one realm alone.
The print publication of A Mouth Holds Many Things features the works of 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists working at the restless intersections of literature, visual art, and other modalities. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this 360-page ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media. We held a very special book celebration and launch event on June 28th, in the exhibit space at Stelo Arts, co-presented by Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). This event included readings by seven of our contributors, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, Monica Ong, Jennifer Perrine, Sandy Tanaka, and a roundtable conversation with the writers moderated by co-editors Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.
The group art exhibition at Stelo Arts (June 6-September 7, 2024) included works by twelve of A Mouth’s contributors: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Samiya Bashir, Jennifer S. Cheng, Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Monica Ong, Paisley Rekdal, Sasha Stiles, and Anna Martine Whitehead; plus a De-Canon Library display containing other books (for browsing) by many of the contributors to the anthology. The exhibit is a spatial-poetic, multimodal extension of the print publication of A Mouth Holds Many Things, an enactment of literature reaching, literally, beyond the page. Experience of book and exhibit together creates an enhanced, multi-faceted, multi-sensory experience of “reading.” We had a robustly attended opening reception on June 6th, with about 200 folks coming through—many thanks to all who have spent time in this space this summer.
We are very grateful to Stelo Arts and Shir Ly Grisanti for hosting our exhibit and for the generous support of the whole Stelo team. We are especially appreciative of the installation design guidance of Marcelo Fontana, and grateful to the whole install team (marvin parra, vy maldonado, Anthony Wylem) for their dexterous hands, eyes, and minds. Their support and collaboration enabled this exhibit to be more than we could envision on our own. Big thanks also to Sharita Towne and Ilish Bath of nun studios for printing risograph exhibit materials and artwork prints; and to the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) for print ephemera support via their re/source residency fellowship program.
We are thankful also to Jeff Alessandrelli and Adie Bovee of Fonograf Editions, for partnering with us to put this collection out into the world. We are very proud of this book and so glad to be able to share it with others. We think of the book itself as a social space, a floating, asynchronous conversation between the works/contributors in the collection that (we hope) will spark further conversations around hybridity and amid/about other hybrid writer-artists. See a complete list of the 36 contributors here.
The book is available direct from our publisher Fonograf Editions as well as via the usual online retailers.
We are delighted to have excerpts, reviews, interviews for A Mouth Holds Many Things appear in:
Full Stop - A Mouth Holds Many Things review by Justin Duyao
LitHub - A Mouth Holds Many Things foreword by Dao Strom
Cleveland Review - Video Poetry Excerpts by Samiya Bashir and Carolina Ebeid
Poets & Writers - review in "The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections"
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A Mouth Holds Many Things, De-Canon Exhibition at Stelo Arts, June-August 2024. Works by (roughly in order of slideshow appearance): Carolina Ebeid; Paisley Rekdal; Sasha Stiles; Nadia Haji Omar & Christine Shan Shan Hou; Diana Khoi Nguyen; Stephanie Adams-Santos; Vi Khi Nao; Monica Ong; Anna Martine Whitehead; Samiya Bashir; Jennifer S. Cheng. Photos by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of Stelo Arts.
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Funding for the publication + exhibit of A Mouth Holds Many Things was provided through an Oregon Community Foundation (OCF) Creative Heights Grant, a Make Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), and a re/source residency fellowship from the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC). The book is a joint publication of Fonograf Editions & De-Canon. Fiscal sponsorship for De-Canon has been provided by Stelo Arts and Oregon Contemporary.
