Local poet and professor Annie Christain announces that second collection of poetry, The Vanguards of Holography, is now available from Headmistress Press.
Just as each severed piece of holographic film contains the whole, The Vanguards of Holography, with its intense, wild, and unexpected explorations of lesbian relationships, artificial intelligence, mind/body philosophies, clones, robots, future shock, mind control, the apocalypse, deep underground military bases, nerd rap, Snape Wives, China, cults, psionics, phone phreaking, street magicians, the Mandela Effect, alternate universes, and The Matrix, can be likened to a shard, a key that can reconstruct/unlock the whole. As physicist David Bohm said, “Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness,” and this strange and singular poetry collection carries with it the weight of conspiracies, alternative history, and the occult—and all the freshness and boldness that comes from shredding, desecrating, and reassembling these theories into new narratives. The Vanguards of Holography is a microcosm and macrocosm, all the weirdness and wonder that can happen when a laser light is split in two.
The Vanguards of Holography was awarded the 2020 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry, an annual award given to one full-length collection by a lesbian-identified poet. Headmistress specializes in poetry and art by lesbians, with a mission to increase lesbian visibility in the arts.
Annie Christain is a professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, Prelude, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She was a first-place winner of the Driftwood Press In-House Poem Contest and received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Her books include Tall As You Are Tall Between Them (C&R Press 2016) and The Vanguards of Holography (Headmistress Press 2021), selected for Sappho’s Prize in Poetry.
