pleasureis amiracle

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.

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.