The Temple of Happiness by Marcella Durand
$20.00
Marcella Durand explores the creative-emotional processes behind building a Temple of Happiness, laying poems one upon the other over loss, anxiety, love and beauty almost too intense to bear. In five sections, she moves from tracing how she might understand reality when reality is reflected through a million deceptive mirrors, to the salvatory prospects of visual art and poetry, to inhabiting the micro and macro universes, from insects to birds to trees to stars to where the universe curves, to deep familial grief only graspable through color. In the last section, she traces the points where her own body meets the rocks and ocean at the edge of a land stolen, claimed, owned and privatized, and by walking/writing into such, she trespasses: into family history, into migrations, and into where one's own temple of happiness might, even ephemerally, make some sort of sense.
"Marcella Durand's lyrical work has always been steeped in poetic ancestry. The Temple of Happiness arrives as an elemental, radiant, fierce — prismatic book, bending, scattering, and refracting the voices of the gone into experimental wonder and emotional urgency. A gift of a book for any hopeful, chromaphilic reader."
-Kostas Anagnopoulos
About the Author
Marcella Durand’s previous book, A Winter Triangle, was selected by Srikanth Reddy for the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and published by Fordham University Press in 2025. She is the coeditor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (MIT Press, 2024), and the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Other books include To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2022), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), The Garden of M./Le Jardin de M., translated by Olivier Brossard and published in a bilingual edition by joca seria, 2016, and a book-length translation of Michele Metail’s constraint-based work, Earth’s Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, (Black Square Editions, 2020). She is currently working on a translation of Brossard’s book from P.O.L., Let, forthcoming from Black Square Editions when she is done.
