Good Monster

Diannely Antigua

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 is the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, episodic Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries—an invented form that collages the author’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.

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ISBN: 9781556596902

Format: Paperback

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People who don’t Understand Mental Illness

are always full of advice—look on the bright side,
do yoga, snap out of it. I’m supposed to put
my feet in the wet grass, touch the sponge
of the earth underneath me—that’s what
my beloved suggests after I have wasted myself
on the pain of the unknown. Enough with distractions,
enough watching Temptation Island reruns, creating
scenarios where I am the jealous woman watching
her lover take body shots off some busty blonde.
I’m really just sad about death. All the deaths
this season makes and remakes. So I put
my feet in the damn grass, get them as wet
and grassy as I possibly can, stomp them
like a child playing in the mud. If I’m going
to take his advice, I’m going to go all out. If being
cured were as easy as putting my feet in the grass,
fuck, cover me in a spring’s worth of clippings.
Aren’t I supposed to try to love it again,
the spring? Each spring, another Jesus to resurrect,
each spring another rotten egg. I thought
I was supposed to leave all my bodies
buried. But I look for them, my fingers
deep in the mud now, scraping the ground
with what nail stubs I have left.

About the Author

Diannely Antigua (she/her) is a Dominican American poet and educator born and raised in Massachusetts. 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, Community of Writers, and the Academy of American Poets. …

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Reviews

“Through richly layered images and precise language, Antigua conveys the speaker’s growing self-awareness as she comes to terms with a formative childhood trauma.” —Leonora Simonovis, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

“Positions us in the molten place where vulnerability and strength live together, writing with and into a self-awareness that manages to feel inviting, welcoming, revelatory.” —Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“Antigua’s sophomore collection is a raw, innovative exploration of the body after trauma. Through lyrical free verse, ‘Sad Girl Sonnets,’ and her invented collage form of the ‘Diary Entry Poem,’ Antigua investigates religious trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. The result is a poetry collection of considerable courage and vulnerability.”—Skylar Miklus, Electric Lit

“As Antigua elucidates, ‘We can’t heal / or hurt alone.’ So, too, can we not heal—or hurt—without a combination of the confessional and the measured. Good Monster offers both, melding the mind and heart with candor and care. Sometimes it’s hell on earth to suffer—or survive. Antigua’s poems may confess to near death experiences, but she exists within the present continuous, the ongoing, the now.”—Hannah Bonner, Adroit

“Antigua blends Eros and Thanatos until they’re practically indistinguishable. . . . In the end, she seems to be making peace with her inner demon, giving life to an old metaphor, offering roses in the final poem.”—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake

“As Good Monster remains in conversation with Antigua’s debut collection regarding an abusive stepfather, loss of faith, and sexuality, she deploys form (Sad Girl sonnets, sestinas, collages), direct language, and bold attempts at reconciling with the past to freshly illuminate a self that can avert the presence of trauma or perhaps even overcome it.”—Sara Verstynenm, Booklist

“It takes more than guts to write great poems about shattering truths, chronic pain and trauma, vulnerability in relationships and regrettable sexual encounters. . . . Working confidently with the line, Antigua uses form to hold up the intricate layers.”—Debbra Palmer, New York Journal of Books