Reviews of Black Hope
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"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

Introduction by Chase Twichell
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Truth-telling is something we want poems to do, but their truths often come marbled with the fat of self-dramatization and seductions of description, music, and intellect that bewitch and entertain us rather than shove us toward the dangers and terrors of the still-unknown. The poems in Marsha de la O's Black Hope tell some very rough truths, and they do it as if they were at war with the inessential. Their intelligence drafts language and emotion into equal service, making one muscle of the m, so that the lyric, narrative, and meditative elements are wholly integrated into a true hybrid that shucks off all the usual tags. These poems are profoundly original, by which I mean they dig all the way back to their psychic and physical origins, each one starting in unfeigned ignorance and ending in fresh discovery. Spontaneous, awake, exploratory, restless, utterly precise, each one advances on the question it wants answered until it knows the secret it was keeping from itself. This is the most difficult and exacting work a poet can do; Marsha de la O does it in poem after poem with a grace that's both steely and full of pathos, and a courage that should be a model for us all.

Good poems should tell the truth, break ground that's new for the poet, and eschew the inessential. They must also go where prose can't. Therein lie both the mystery and the difficulty of poetry. Black Hope is a book that takes us deep into the unparaphrasable regions of human consciousness, and it goes there not to mystify but to clarify, to drag back out into the light our cruelty and brutality as well as our moments of joy and delight. 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.