Antidote for Night

Winner of the 2015 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, this latest from de la O (Black Moon) offers a vividly captured Southern California. Just don't expect sun, sand, and celebrity glam; the poet's hard-knocks world instead encompasses drive-by killings, hard labor ("thirty-eight years working the same loom"), and orange trees blackened by coking factories. Splendidly incisive, de la O doesn't so much observe landscapes as create them, just as her father "conjured this city,/ my labyrinth, our treasure" while navigating the "red snake/ traffic." More significant is how she creates emotional landscape, suffusing her lines with both sorrow ("I don't remember/ when my voice took on its bitterness") and longing (a bird's song recalls "the rain we yearn for, a cistern/ in my heart full as never again"). Strong portraits range from a honeybee to a sad-eyed former student who ends tragically, and the well-displayed natural world is folded into the human. For instance, an escapee from a locked ward is shot dead even as a lost bear cub is tranquilized by dart, and in one poem the pregnant speaker confronts a pregnant possum that stands her ground ("don't tell me animals can't make mortal/ mortal calculations").