Good Monster

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection ＂voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,＂ chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths--a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s ＂soft harm＂--the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When ＂God [becomes] a house [she] can’t leave,＂ language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries--an invented collage form using Antigua’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.

Diannely Antigua (she/her) is a Dominican American poet and the thirteenth poet laureate of New Hampshire. Her debut collection, Ugly Music, won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the winner of fellowships from CantoMundo and Community of Writers. Her work has appeared in the Best of the Net Anthology and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as New Hampshire’s poet laureate and is the youngest and first person of color to hold the title. As host of the Bread & Poetry podcast, she aims to make poetry more accessible to the Portsmouth community, interviewing poets and non-poets alike about what poetry means to them.