Marcella Durand

About this slightly crooked street that slants uphill toward Trinity Church are skyscrapers built to mirror the wealth that supports them. They supplant the natural horizon, allowing those within to admire their wealth reflected back to them in an artificial sky of seemingly unlimited acquisition. But the work in this issue of About Place: Wall Street seeks to unsettle this desperate onanism: the creative word also represents larger ideas—questioning, dissent, community. This issue of About Place is edited by poet and essayist Marcella Durand, who grew up a few blocks from Wall Street and who has written, gazed, protested, sketched and sculpted in its shadows and corners.
 
 
 
Marcella Durand’s books include Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh (Little Red Leaves, 2009); Area (Belladonna Books, 2008); and Traffic & Weather, a site-specific book-length poem written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in downtown Manhattan (Futurepoem Books, 2008). She was a 2009 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the 2010-2011 Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice for the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and a 2011-2013 Fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Her essays on the intersections of poetry and ecology have appeared in Barzakh, Interim, Ecopoetics, Chain, The Poker, Conjunctions, NYFA Current, HOW(2), Critiphoria, and other journals. She lives in New York City, where she has recently completed a new collection of poems titled The Prospect and is working on a book-length alexandrine.