The Radiant City by Sandra Florence is the first book-length collection of poems by a poet who has been writing for over forty years, and although the poems do not themselves span that entire time, one piece, "Nettles," was begun over thirty years ago and serves as a centering piece for the first two-thirds of the book. "Nettles" is a long narrative poem that contains many of the themes that emerge in the later poems that are magnified and focused upon, the premise being that family relationships, friendship, and landscape (here it is the San Joaquin Valley of California) are not only...