[01/14/25] Messinger, Bianca Rae: pleasureis amiracle

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: January 14, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 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.