"In the title poem of Marsha de la O’s new book, there is no antidote for night. Night—the domain of dream and death—is the price we pay for life and imagination. It is the without which not of art and love, and we make our accommodation with it as best we can. No one knows what terror or delights the next dreamscape will offer, and part of the charm of de la O’s poems is their utter unpredictability. She has studied her Neruda and Vallejo and concluded that the art of poetry involves giving readers not what they want but what they need....Faithful to the advice of Robert Bly, that early translator of the Spanish-language surrealists and advocate of ‘leaping poetry,’ de la O braids narrative, weaving rhythm and melody into un-ravel-able wholes....This is a magical book, not just because witches and magic figure in the poems, but because the poems themselves are charms, incantations, hexes and prayers. They offer an old-fashioned remedy for a contemporary soul sickness." —Lee Rossi, Los Angeles Review
"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"... A terrific discovery that many readers will find both illuminating and accessible." —Library Journal
"Antidote for Night is visceral, often looking squarely in the eyes of death and violence. In particular her musings on certain young men of color — some she knew growing up, others her students during 25-plus years as a bilingual educator in Los Angeles and Santa Paula — stand out, if only for their timeliness, being published as they are in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner and Walter Scott at the hands of police." —Ventura County Reporter
"Antidote for Night by Marsha de la O is a gem. This award-winning poetry book is written by a poet who is completely tuned into her world, never missing a nuance, observation or opportunity to invite the reader to join her in transcendence. These contemplative poems are a balance of the darkness and the light that we all face; always embracing the importance of family, birth, death, health, beauty and the natural world ... This is one of those rare poetry books that needs to be read slowly and listened to carefully. The messages here are profound and strong, akin to the psalms. They have wisdom and a musical quality that inspires us to read them over and over again." —Dr. Diana Raab
"In Antidote for Night, [Marsha de la O] slips her scalpel beneath the slippery patinas of Southern California, flaying away media exaggerations to reveal the beauty and the bestial." —Heavy Feather Review
"Like Gary Soto and Philip Levine, de la O has that rare gift to write poems rooted in a consistent landscape, yet the variety, nuance, and emotional maturity in her work transcend local considerations to achieve universal appeal....Antidote for Night is an ethereal, sonorous, and gripping collection that seeks, for humanity and for the earth, a reckoning with 'the actual damage/the way the body took it.'" —Adam Tavel, Plume
“Set in present-day Southern California, this Isabella Gardner Award–winning collection is a heartbreak lyric, a corrido, a love song to California’s city lights and far-flung outskirts that deals with the press of mortality and the violent losses of young men of color.” —Publishers Weekly
08/01/2015
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
