Overview

FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD IN LESBIAN POETRY A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet's body and the world. In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound-words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation. An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa.

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9781643622415

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Reviews

“This group of poems changes on each page, apparently enacting what it says, ‘feeling what it’s like to feel things over a continuum instead of a sharp peak and valley.’ It’s not that this sentiment is so much a breakthrough (this statement is not unlike William James’s about ‘feelings of and,’ to take one example of how the century has dealt with writing feelings)—it’s the invention of an explosive, wry diagrammatic specific talking that makes the group of poems so great and makes them stand independent, wanting their own small book.” —Simone White, in praise of parallel bars

""The poems talk about memory as though time itself were a screen saver—a series of recurring dreams that overlap."" —Nora Claire Miller, The Paris Review ""Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle wants maximalism and long mornings, luxury free of corrupting wealth, many things stuffed into a small space. Her words often get truncated, spaces lost in the mix (“anattempt to compromise,” “whatyou miss is beauty”), as if she has run out of room for her abundant language."" —Ayaz Muratoglu, Poetry Project Newsletter ""The way Messinger produces and overcomes space, I want to weep. ‘It’s all right if you don’t return my love’—what an image of grace. In the red interplay of anticipation and knowledge, she shows us bodies as bits of psychic pressure, active, luminous, without guarantees. How green is the valley of syntax, of poems that don’t feel without thinking. ‘she’s gone isn’t it, I will wake up there wont i—.’ Look at what language can do, always more than what we can say, when it sees the struggle inside itself."" —Benjamin Krusling ""Feel the title in your mouth: a linguistically foreign substance from which something ravishing and graceful emerges. In the lush textures of this luminous new work, Bianca Rae Messinger brings the reader to thresholds of perception precisely where existential and relational vectors collide. The energies generated by the poems’ formal innovations—margins, boxes, bars, syntactical boundaries, verbal mergings, moving screens of simultaneous action—spark the air of each page. Feel the inexorable motion of the world as it slips in and out of reach. This work’s pleasures make a practice of transformation.""—Elizabeth Willis “What does it mean to live in a world with sound, but to not fully hear it? Both an experiment in form and syntax, Messinger’s poetry reconceptualizes time, memory, and space through lyrical fragments from the past.” —Casper Orr, Heavy Feather Review ""Against Bianca Messinger’s ‘chronic chronophobia,’ time deliquesces, the poems dwells in dreamscapes where, confronted with the sublime experience of song, feelings struggle ‘against their inadequate form.’ Messinger exploits the ambiguity of typography in textual space, forging alternate word boundaries, verbal arrangements, new possibilities for the subject to live in the architecture of grammar. Riffing off Hejinian ‘as for we who love to be / undone’ the poems (and the reader) delight in these fruitful reconfigurations; roses grow in their footfalls, becoming a curative for melancholia.""—Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Author Information

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks The Love of God (2016) and parallel bars (2021) and translator of In the Jungle There is Much to Do (2020) among others.

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