[08/08/26] Durand, Marcella: The Temple of Happiness

Black Square Editions, paperback

Publication Date: August 8, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

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