Leigh Ann Christain

Introduction

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.

Resident planning

During my residency, I plan to work on my third book of poetry Colorless to Destroy the Health of a Human Hero. I will be researching hero’s journeys, near death experiences, Gnostic philosophies, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, color theory (philosophy, psychology), the light/physics of visible wavelengths, and Optometry & Ophthalmology/human vision. In addition to incorporating and layering these themes and research into my poetry, I will also be experimenting with writing poetry that is “filling in the blanks” of omitted or missing writing/media throughout history. For example, in The (First) Apocalypse of James from The Nag Hammadi Library, there are passwords and instructions that an individual needs to say after death to make it to the highest heaven (out of 72). However, the scroll has been damaged and there are no surviving copies that provide this information to the reader. My poem will fill in these blanks and provide options/suggestions, while also expressing the anxiety and existential angst of the human condition and the limited tools/knowledge we are given in terms to the meaning/purpose of life. In this way, my book will be grounded in the spiritual, philosophical, and metaphysical. I will do further research on damaged historical records, indecipherable lyrics, and incomplete or partially lost films so I can use the remnants as inspiration to construct my own missing pieces.