Black Hope

$12.00 paper | $22.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-932826-51-0 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0-932826-50-3 (cloth)
Publication Date: 1997
75 Pages | Foreword by Chase Twichell
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Winner of the New Issues 1997 Poetry Prize
Chase Twichell, Judge

“Hard luck, black hope, whatever it is that ‘darkens in us every day,’ this is just what Marsha de la O has willed into the light in these gorgeous, harrowing poems. I don’t know what I admire most, her merciless intelligence or her merciful spirit. I know we are luckier for having these fresh and remarkable poems before us in the world.”
—Nancy Eimers

“Marsha de la O’s poems begin where most others leave off. She writes with unsentimental clarity of power and desire, the struggle of the self to remain whole and to speak its disturbing truths. This is a book of crisis, resistance, and difficult grace.”
—Cynthia Huntington

“A poet such as Marsha de la O, when confined to the dark, develops infrared vision and a language that radiates its terrible knowledge. We may be afraid but we go with her, wherever she goes, beyond anywhere we have been, because she knows what she knows.”
—Deena Metzger

“Whether her subject is mental illness, the oppression of one human being by another, or the constantly-cast shadow of our mortality, Marsha de la O’s resilient, unpretentious, sharply intelligent and unsentimental voice speaks to us of what we need to know. This is a disturbing and memorable book.”
—Chase Twichell, from the foreword

Marsha de la O

Marsha de la O lives in Ventura, California with her husband and daughter. She received an M.F.A. in Writing Poetry from Vermont College.