Antidote for Night

January 4, 2016
De La O (Black Hope) counters Southern California's sunny image and reveals it to be filled with darkness, thirst, and hunger in this evocative collection, winner of the 2015 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. "Hunger is the first and/ last word. When all words in California/ slide into the sea, hunger will be the last to fall," she writes, her lines unhinging the region's secrets through memories of everyday peopleâher working-class father, her late mother, and the women and men who journey to California only to brutally fail. De La O demonstrates deft control through a sense of restraintâin terms of both narrative and melodic rhythmâthat is noticeable in her enjambment, and she creates tension via selective disclosures of information: "Did I mention I'm afraid of the dark?" Drawing from the symbolic imagery of the corvid, De La O parallels the haunting quality of the insatiable bird through her portrayal of women: "That night I felt a bird enter and sink down/ through me, the bird that is thirst// the bird that could drink an ocean and not be quenched." Like the women and birds she depicts, De La O's California offers transcendent mystery as an end in itself, and in doing so, transforms a regional poetry into something more universal.

August 1, 2015

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"). VERDICT A terrific discovery that many readers will find both illuminating and accessible.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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