A Winter Triangle

Winner of the 2023–24 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, Selected by Srikanth Reddy

A poetic exploration that reimagines form and language through celestial patterns

Informed by mystery, chaos, order and writing as container, A Winter Triangle explores poetic space and form amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or “points,” like its namesake asterism, this collection is inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s idea of composing poetry from the “senseless splendor” of the skies, as well as the designs for automata by twelfth-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

Inventing a new poetic form, the septentrional, which trembles in its own process of becoming throughout the length of the book, Marcella Durand questions the potential of poetry in the face of artificial intelligence, climate change, and political turbulence in which language is often twisted into the opposite of its own meaning. By counting the seven syllables of the septentrional and opening spaces (caesura) within the poetic line to provide breath and rejuvenation amid exhausting world events, these poems resituate poetry as an alternate space in which to reimagine the given forms of constellations and how we imagine order out of seeming chaos. Thus the question is opened as to whether the poet may ever make sense of the “senseless splendor” of the skies, or simply convey them as they are through poetry, holding the infinite within the finite, for a time.

Durand reads the “dustlike” script of the calligraphic galleon, a ship created entirely out of words, as art and struggles to understand the burning dog/wolf star that stands between law and lawlessness. Is there actual connection between stars in the constellations we have invented? Can we find room for composition within the broken loops of infinity? At the point between old and new, bow and arrow, chaos and order, A Winter Triangle asks us to face the overwhelm of change—self-inflicted, invented, planetary, and real.