THE VANGUARDS OF HOLOGRAPHY

Christain makes meaning from the fragments of dystopia in her second poetry collection.

“Never model a love on the extinction of a species,” cautions one speaker at the end of a poem late in this collection, which finds its vernacular in a world collapsing in a cloud of technology, religion, pop culture, and astrophysics. The poems discover metaphors for love in the imagery of SF, as in the inaugural piece, “Heaven Is a Soundstage Meant To Make Drugged Soldiers More Fearless”: “That’s mine, I scream as a red lever appears under my armpit, and she knows to pull it. / I’d like to think that means my cloned body on another planet actually hooked up with her.” Alienation and queer longing seek articulation in wide-ranging references to cartoons, conspiracy theories, hip-hop, biblical eschatology, cinema, and the occult. The isolation of outer space (and art about this emptiness) reappears again and again, as when Christain invokes the frozen body of an Earth-destroying comet: “Someone could share my same center of mass now without pretensions, but I’m misting out chemicals to hide myself so I won’t have to kill anyone.” Elsewhere, the poet contemplates the iconoclasm of new technology with gleeful disdain: “Though I destroyed the Buddhist ruins, / the 3D light projection replacement / was going to create many jobs, but no one else saw it that way.” Like the points of light that revivify a dead performer in this verse, Christain’s poems find organic life in the clips and blips of the digital present.

Throughout this book, the poet’s works have an unpredictable energy, marrying hyperspecific language with surprising leaps in image and tone. There are misheard lyrics, erasures made from news stories, extensive footnotes, and well-deployed (and often obscure) epigraphs. She’s frequently funny, but the phantasmagoria works better when the underlying emotions are sincere, as here, where the vacuum of space is the void between human bodies: “She said our sun entered into it, its plasma crossing with Saturn’s plasma….The electric discharge became a ladder to Earth, and this, she had to press into me, has everything to do with us now, and how no baby is ever a mistake.” At another point, the now-ancient technology of an instant messenger bridges the same void: “When I was in the tenth grade, / an older woman in a chat room asked, / What do you want to do? / and I wrote Just hold you.” Other standouts in this collection include “Retrieval Structure” (“If you were trying not to stumble into anything too sharp…how did you?”), “Coral Castle: The Tent of Meaning,” “Music Used Against the Enemy,” and “I Need You To Make Me My Own Dinosaur, But It Must Have Feathers,” which yields the quote about extinction noted above. (Needless to say, Christain clearly enjoys wordy titles.) Although these works do not give up their meanings easily, they are messy and intricate in a way that draws the reader deep inside.

An elegantly chaotic collection of Space Age verses.