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.
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"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 inter-
play 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 we we can
say, when it sees the struggle inside itself."
--Benjamin Krusling
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"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 in-
novations--margins, boxes, bars, syntactical bound-
aries, 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
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"Against Bianca Messinger's 'chronic chronophobia,'
time deliquesces, the poems dwell in dreamscapes
where, confronted with the sublime experience of
song, feelings struggle 'against their inadequate
form.' Messinger exploits the ambiguity of typo-
graphy 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
these fruitful reconfigurations; roses grow in their
footfalls, becoming a curative for melancholia."
--Julian Talamantez Brolaski
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pleasureis amiracle || Nightboat Books, 2025
now available for pre-order