Area by Marcella Durand

Praise

A wonderful book of presence where sentences point to new directions of meaning among planets, colors, mechanics, botanic and language itself. A new configuration of feelings and knowledge exposed in the most renewed poetical process of sensing life as it flows. A brilliant book about a new location for our notion of space and time.

—Nicole Brossard

Marcella Durand’s books include Traffic & Weather, The Anatomy of Oil, Western Capital Rhapsodies, City of Ports, and Lapsus Linguae. Her poems and essays on the intersections of poetry with ecology, architecture, and art have appeared in Conjunctions, NYFA Current, Ecopoetics, 26, Chain, and other journals. She was a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2006, and in 2005, organized a reading and panel on the inter-relations between astronomy and poetry as part of the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena Conference at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. For the past several years, she has been translating Michèle Métail’s book-length work, Les horizons du sol/Earth’s Horizons, a history of the geological formation of Marseille written within an Oulipian formal constraint. She has lived in NYC more or less since she was small, with interludes in Boston, New Orleans, Cork, Ireland, and Paris, France. She currently lives in the East Village with her husband Richard O’Russa and son Ismael Toussaint Durand O’Russa.