from The Light Factory
Word count: 93
Paragraphs: 11
Suzan Frecon, stroke field, 2022. Watercolor on paper, 10 ¼ x 11 ⅞ inches. From The Light Factory (Insurance Editions, 2025) by Suzan Frecon and Marcella Durand. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Insurance Editions.
circles for wheelmakers
the wren sings in circles for wheelmakers
and its song trails through the deep woods
song may not be perfect circles but is circular
or at least looping and how without our hands
on a wheel do woods assemble themselves
how does complex randomness come
to be beautiful, dangerous, wonderful
how do we know the woods or soil
or circles to be without us? our eyes
already change what we pass through
Marcella Durand’s next book, The Temple of Happiness, is forthcoming from Black Square Editions fall 2026. Her book, A Winter Triangle, received the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize (Fordham University Press, 2025). She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (MIT Press, 2024).
Suzan Frecon (b. 1941) is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she describes her practice—“speak for themselves.” Made over long stretches of time, her work invites the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, “are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience.”