Marsha De La O

WINNER OF THE 2015 ISABELLA GARDNER POETRY AWARD Set in present-day Southern California, Antidote for Night is a heartbreak lyric, a corrido, a love song to California's city lights and far-flung outskirts--the San Diego backcountry, the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, and the Mojave Desert. Marsha de la O's voice is a kind of free jazz, musically rich with LA noir and the vastness of metropolitan Southern California. Marsha de la O's Black Hope won the New Issues Prize from the University of Western Michigan and an Editor's Choice Award. She has taught Spanish-speaking children in Los Angeles and Ventura County for thirty years.

“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.”—Chase Twichell, from the foreword