Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite

“By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit.”

Bianca Stone is a visual artist and poet, best known until now for the collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. Her 2022 poetry book What Is Otherwise Infinite is a witty yet dolorous search for what life can mean when God feels distant or simply inaccessible, yet weirdly omnipresent. The book’s tone of backtalk by a chronic backslider caught in a cyclical mental Via Crucis could suggest that Infinite is governed by poststructuralist sass, in which there is no transcendental signified, à la Derrida.

Yet this is not the case. Stone’s poetic mindset here is captured in the cognitive dissonance existing between Neoplatonism, with its rationalist consciousness and demands for strict proof, and Scholasticism, the latter being faithful, secure, self-sure, yet beset by its own dogma. Stone is like an audiophile wanting the separation and clarity of digital media yet still craving the pops and crackles of analog sound. This is a chronicle of grit and mud. For as is the case with the great Christian mystics, Stone’s persona is governed by moods ranging from momentary ecstasy to tormented near-defeat, in this taxing, rewarding volume.

This poetry’s penchant for bleak expression, as in “Yield,” feels strangely enlivening.

“Get down on your knees and be thunderstruck with language.

Start in like those fanatics you read about

who stop eating and drinking and live

on the breath of irises, heavy mist.”

On the other hand, Stone’s extravagant and quirky sensibility provides a stream of images and similes that stray into comedy and dark wit, as in “Mary Magdalene,” in which Jesus’s favorite Girl Friday might just be trapped in an eternal temp job.