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. In epistolary poems, sets, diagrams, mythology, and reworkings of Shakespearean sonnets, she writes through chronophobia, the fear of time, and through depression, in the vein of Bernadette Mayer or Virginia Woolf, where the ability to turn to theory, to look at “small things” (Mayer) or “give the moment whole” (Woolf), might ease the mind. If Messinger’s pleasure were to take the form of a mathematical symbol, it would be a vector: without width, in motion, timeless. This pleasure dissolves boundaries between states—both as forms an emotion might take or as states in the political sense—and amplifies as time ceases to exist: “you are a / very distinct pleasure because / you have no time.” Sometimes an ability to focus the mind on what is at hand will cure chronophobia, and sometimes such attention is a false promise. Either way, the book argues, it is almost always pleasure, actualized through motion or constriction, that soothes time’s panic.

In her pursuit of pleasure, Messinger tosses us into a cloistered world, one surrounded by scraps of letters and memories, where the language is sometimes squeezed into boxes or stars, approximating nearsightedness:

The book’s two epigraphs frame this emphasis on enclosure: one, a quote from Margaret Cavendish’s 1668 play The Convent of Pleasure, where nuns encloister themselves in pursuit of pleasure, and the other, N. H. Pritchard’s “The Narrow Path,” the first line of which—“Very due that being each one dwells”—takes Gerard Manley Hopkins outside, rewriting the line “Deals out that being indoors each one dwells” from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Taken together, they announce a meditation on inside and outside. Pleasure takes place indoors, as in the Monterey hotel room of “pleasureis,” where memory is constructed from the repeated phrase “i think of you,” the stanza overwhelmed by recollection:

Messinger returns over and over to the pleasure of “the narrow path,” the small room, the constrained space, which might yet be a cure to chronophobia. The book also takes formal pleasure in narrowed columns, black borders around text boxes that stretch across the pages. In “ravishing of a field,” Messinger quotes Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: “A spiral is the shape of a / progression of circles. Thus myopia / may serve to dispel the pains of / chronophobia,” and then, in a tall rectangle that stretches past the bottom of the verso:

A focus on what is at hand, in the room, tricking the mind into occupying an object, may provide temporary relief, but as the poem spirals outwards, “onwards,” the image becomes gesture, form mimicking the feeling of spiraling back into panic. Messinger shows us how forms of inquiry falter in the face of panic: trying to make models out of emotions leads the mind astray, and reason cannot always save us.

Reason’s failure becomes a pleasurable undoing. Borrowing a self-effacing construction from Hejinian, Messinger writes, “as for we who love to be / undone – becoming rope or / some tiny elevator resembling / its cover being exactly in / packing sheets.” Hejinian’s line is “as for we who ‘love to be astonished.’” In an essay in We Who Love to Be Astonished, a collection on experimental women’s writing that borrows its title from the same Hejinian line, Laura Hinton claims that “any representational excess [in My Life], any residue of a vision that is aimed outside the text, is rubbed and frayed until it is absorbed by its own verbal profusion.” But when Messinger points to Hejinian, she brings the outside into the text, staying with the mind and the thought. This sustained attention makes room for pleasure, which is physical, idiosyncratic, in process.

When abstracted, the movement of time evokes fear; when placed into a repetitive action, it is what makes pleasure possible. Messinger returns to movement throughout the book in two different contexts: one, as the main factor of what facilitates pleasure, as in things moving in and out, and then as the primary mechanism of what happens to time. She wants to let “ability tell when / something adds movement,” and offers that this “specific kind of knowledge” will help one make sense of the world, place it into order. Movement has beginning, is loosely related to memory, can exist in narrowness but need not become narrow. From “it being unrelenting,” describing a field of rhododendrons:

Messinger is far more interested in the way pleasure acts upon an object, upon a body—and how that might become recognizable or formal—than in explicating the particular conditions that may produce it. From the poem “parallel bars”:

The poem turns to sculpture, and the wind outside has a point of view. For Messinger (via Thomas Aquinas, who argued that the universal good is god, that everything else is just “one good among others”), pleasure on its own, it seems, does not count among the created goods. While pleasure is a miracle, it is not inherently godly. Instead, pleasure only actualizes in the moment it meets an object, which is marked by a shift in shape: the street becomes storm, the enjoyment of the object becomes “very soft,” the flowers get tied to the base of the river. But it’s not so simple as the body serving as a vector for pleasure. In an interview with Nightboat’s Dante Silva, Messinger notes, “In order to change one’s gender under western society’s ‘attendant structures,’ one must constantly prove how much ‘pleasure’ they’re having, how ‘happy’ they are having such and such a body; as if we live in a society that has any actual conception of what ‘pleasure’ actually means; as if we actually have any idea whatsoever of what it means to be a body.” Within the box, the speaker can be “not withholding”—it is in this narrow space that pleasure might begin to flower.

The contradictions between inside and outside, pleasure and time that Messinger introduces in the first half of the book start to converge in a final epistolary poem addressed to “the state of the Holy Spirit.” Now, love has the potential to be practical—“I wish love made me make my bed”—and Messinger’s thinking is explicated, moves away from abstraction—“is me describing my desire for a bath a flirtation? am i flirting with you, holy spirit?” The poem’s logic shifts and grows into itself: drawing a bath counts as flirtation, a child makes a passport out of crayons, little glowing stars in a square approximate a childhood photograph, sentences can be capitalized because time has been eradicated. Constriction begets release in the form of pleasure, as picturing the petals on a rose leads to orgasm:

The curative myopia takes on new form in the bedroom: nearsightedness is replaced with memory, and memory functions as a vehicle for overwhelm. It’s fitting, then, that Messinger’s focus on a remedy gets overridden by an outside image—the rose—freeing her. Messinger: “touse this moving feels so / timeless when outside is so / tragic.” Perhaps the cure, then, comes simply from movement, from knowing what is outside so that one can turn away from it, land inside the object experiencing pleasure. Like the nuns who find pleasure in their encloistered state, the speaker imagines the outside world from a position she cannot escape.