“In ‘Creature,’ I didn’t want my skin to be on so tight. I wanted to overthrow unitary consciousness in favor of animal selves. After all, animal is derived from ‘anima’ which means soul.”
In the title poem of her new book, “Creature,” Marsha de la O recounts a quiet November day at home when a hawk crashed through an open window and found itself trapped in her living room – injecting terror, urgency, and a curious parallel. Who is the creature? Who is trapped inside? Written during the final five years of her father’s life, Marsha’s powerful collection of poems on love, loss, family, and the natural world beats with wild force and revealing pitch and rhythm. Finding connection with other life forms – hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses – her music opens and uplifts the heart. “We write from subjectivity but also as penetrated by the world, entangled,” she says, “I will always be grateful for the way the world has touched me.”
Marsha de la O is a lecturer in the English Department at California State University, Channel Islands, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. Author of four books of poetry, she is the recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Slowdown, and many journals. Together with her husband, she founded the Ventura County Poetry Project to support local poetry. | 
