As much as the fence was meant to be a protective barrier, more often than not, it felt like a cage, confining us in a home laden with violence. I didn’t know then that anyone kept in a cage for too long risked becoming monstrous. In this picture, the balls on my hair ties look almost like the start of little horns.
-Diannely Antigua, in regards to the cover of Good Monster
from Copper Canyon PRess
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.
Praise for Good MonsteR
This book holds hope and forgiveness for a self that is “broken like bread.” Exclaiming “Maybe I was terrible and beautiful things still happened,” these poems are not afraid to become “the villain in the room,” to dive deep into what is monstrous and angelic. These poems ask us: What is a self? With poetry as our friend, we find an answer in the returning sunshine always. To hope for a self that can bloom again, reappear from something terrible and beautiful and still sing.
— Dorothea Lasky, author of The Shining
These poems are not afraid to become “the villain in the room.”
Antigua’s lyrical sorcery, will break you, embrace you, and shove your face in the muck the second you’re tempted to look away.
“I want to be the ruined woman who stays / alive,” Diannely Antigua avows in Good Monster, an intoxicating, chest-open account of the resurrected self who has defied countless deaths. These poems press into the wound as a path to relief. Good Monster, electric with Antigua’s lyrical sorcery, will break you, embrace you, and shove your face in the muck the second you’re tempted to look away. Because these poems never look away. Good Monster is a visceral sad-girl triumph.
— Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster is a vivid fever dream of a book. Antigua’s electrifying voice articulates the power and vulnerabilities of the body in poems that are both intimate and fierce, blazing with life force despite the world’s pervasive violence and harm.
— Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons
…blazing with life force despite the world’s pervasive violence and harm.
THE GOOD MONSTER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
With a song for every poem, listen to the playlist in order for the full musical experience…