pleasureis amircale booklaunch

Bianca Rae Meesinger // Nora Collen Fulton // Shiv Kotecha // Mohammed Zenia

pleasureis amiracle

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.

PRAISE

“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

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” (Inpatient Press, 2016) and “parallel bars” (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others.