“We Never Really Touch Anyone Because of Molecules”: Distance and Disconnect in Annie Christain’s The Vanguards of Holography (2021, Headmistress Press)
A hologram is an illusion. You think you’re looking at something three-dimensional and lifelike, but what you see is only an image, a reconstruction of reality rather than reality itself. What could be a more fitting image to encapsulate the illusoriness, isolation and distance that pervade collective life in this post-truth, post-Covid era—one in which facts are subsumed by beliefs and a screen avatar can stand in for a physical body? In her most recent collection of poems, The Vanguards of Holography, Annie Christain creates a pervasive sense of disconnection and disembodiment.
I Love My Pleasure: A Review of My Pleasure by Irene Silt
Love brings death closer. The collapsing space between is the setting of Irene Silt's My Pleasure (Deluge Books, 2022). Silt’s poems occupy the protracted time of wanting and waiting, elaborating the delay between desire and arrival—consummation of love or death. Illuminations strobe over a shadow world where oppositions melt inside one another:
Nonfiction by Kat Savino
Through The Six Inch Valley