Annie Christain

The Vanguards of Holography Annie Christain

Winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry

The second collection of a strange and powerful new queer voice in American poetry.

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.

Poetry as messages from another world, an urgent cascade of keys and codes; this is a poet I will follow into any dark without fear of losing our way. This book is a razor to cut your way out in case of emergencies. You will want to keep it close.
-CAConrad

Grounded in keen juxtapositions, The Vanguards of Holography is as capacious as it is pithy, as futuristic as it is mythic, as cerebral as it is primal.
-Julie Marie Wade

If holography is, in part, a consideration of three-dimensional light, this award-winning collection lasers enlightenment, whiteness, and the spotlight into what? Luciferous poetry.
-Douglas Kearney

A strange and powerful new queer voice in American poetry in the tradition of Djuna Barnes and Jack Spicer but also with her own peculiar and dense imaginative territory to map.
-Stu Watson