Mentions and Reviews

• RHINO POETRY, Review: Good Monster by Diannely Antigua

  The fierce intelligence of Good Monster shines in the distance between Antigua and her speaker. An exhilarating and painful read, Good Monster will strike a chord with anyone who struggles with the self-love necessary for deep relationships.

• North of Oxford, Review: Good Monster by Diannely Antigua

  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.

  
  
  

• Poetry Foundation, Harriet Books Review

  Antigua’s collection, Good Monster, whose focus is the body, both wounded and whole, and the experiences that have led the speaker to see herself as a monster…

  
  

• The POetry Question, REVIEW: GOOD MONSTER BY DIANNELY ANTIGUA (COPPER CANYON PRESS)

  Good Monster is one of the most successful and engaging treatments of confessional poetry in recent memory, a brilliant follow-up to Antigua’s award-winning debut. This is a book you will want to read over and over.

• Electric Literature, 15 New and Forthcoming POetry Collections YOu should be reading

  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.

• POets & Writers Magazine, Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

  “This isn’t an apology but rather a confession: / I loved your body before I was born.” Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, May 2024) by Diannely Antigua. Second book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editors: Michael Wiegers and Ash Wynter. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi. Listen to Diannely Antigua read from her book here.

• The Academy of American Poets Awards $1.1 Million to 23 Poets Laureate Across the United States

  Diannely Antigua, Poet Laureate Fellow, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Diannely Antigua will develop The Bread & Poetry Project, which will honor The Hoot Poetry Reading series and the Esther Buffler Poet-in-Residence program, two legacy projects created by former Portsmouth poets laureate. She will also continue her Bread & Poetrypodcast and partner with local organizations NH PANTHER and HAVEN to lead writing workshops, putting into practice poetry’s power to enact social change. 

• Terse Journal, On Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua, Reviewed by Margaryta GolovChenko

  “The collection is not music in the sense that Antigua tames or wrangles the traumas and worries into submissiveness. Rather, its musicality is in a wholeness that resists the romanticization of lived experience, a voice that charms as it unapologetically pierces through layers of presumptuous padding.”

• THE POETRY FOUNDATION, 2021 Ruth LIlly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Finalists

  Diannely Antigua, Bryan Byrdlong, Steven Espada Dawson, Noor Hindi, Alexis V. Jackson, Aurielle Marie, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Kelan Nee, Tamara Panici, Julian Randall, Natasha Rao, & Simon Shieh

• The Sundress Blog, Lyric Essentials: Anna Meister Reads Diannely Antigua

  Anna Meister: “I wanted to speak about Diannely’s poetry because I so appreciate and admire the frank, unapologetic way her work wrangles mental illness as subject matter. I almost wrote that her poems embody a fearlessness, but I think it’s more that the poet allows fear (of stigma, of succumbing, of survival) to be in the poems, and I find that honesty very brave and refreshing.”

• Ms. Magazine, Five Women Poets on Writing the Body

  Patricia Smith, “Writers who inspire her: Sharon Olds, Omotara James, Diannely Antigua, Ellen Bass, Rachel McKibbens”

• Acento, Amor de música fea: el diáfano sonido de Diannely Antigua

  “Es una poesía de la lucha y el reencuentro. Hay una delicadeza y una nostalgia en la misma, y sin embargo, puedo encontrar en ella una fuerza, una resistencia, una callada y serena batalla palabra tras palabra.”

• Pleiades Mag, Visual Review: Gabrielle Bates on Diannely Antigua’s Ugly Music

  “The coming-of-age narrative that unfolds in Ugly Music is dark, certainly, haunted by childhood sexual abuse, depression, and the gendered power dynamics of a Pentecostal upbringing, but in navigating this darkness, Antigua evokes a richness of texture, sound, and color.”

• Sampsonia Way Magazine, Diversidad Y Unidad

  For Antigua, her latinidad is a vital, but not exclusive part of her identity. At the same time, though, she says, “My poetry is Latinx because a Latinx person wrote them.”

  
  
  
  

• Merrimack Valley Magazine, Eight Great Things to Do This Weekend

  NECC alumna and West Newbury resident Diannely Antigua was recently one of 10 emerging writers to receive the prestigious Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, Ugly Music, was featured in our 2019 summer reading guide.

• THE WHITING FOUNDATION, 2020 AWARD WINNER

  “For Diannely Antigua, the body is a site of trauma and awe; it is at once magical and damaged. Antigua's poems layer lyricism, religious language, and the tactile materials of daily life to build altars of affection for the people and things of her world.”

• THE MAYNARD, SHORT-FORM SHOUT OUT, UGLY MUSIC

  “This is Diannely Antigua’s testimony, this is her “song of herself,” that is to “fall on the world / like an ugly music,” but is also “a beautiful fucking church.” Read it and praise its music of the heart!”

• MUZZLE MAGAZINE, HUNGER MAKES ME A MODERN GIRL: DIANNELY ANTIGUA’S UGLY MUSIC

  “Diannely Antigua’s Ugly Music is a book for our times—sardonic, self-effacing, sincere. The speaker is a bad feminist in the ways that we are all bad feminists—negotiating our desire for equality with the many ways we are imperfect.”

• Electric Literature: 10 Collections by Latinx Poets You Might Have Missed in 2019

  ”In her debut collection, Diannely Antigua searches for identity amidst the murkiness of a religiously oppressive adolescence, past traumas, and mental illness.

• The Sundress Press Blog: The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua

  In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, this selection comes from Diannely Antigua’s book, Ugly Music.

from “Something Dies in Me Every Month”

I'm trying to be decent, I'm trying
to believe in the therapy of sweeping rooms, of sugar
on my wrists.

• LUNA LUNA MAGAZINE, 3 POETRY BOOKS YOU SHOULD BE READING

  “Antigua is a masterful writer and wrote a book that doesn’t care about treading lightly, but wants you to fully dive into the ocean of exploration; Ugly Music explores identity, sexuality, trauma, and survival.

• rhino Poetry, Book Review

  “By blurring the lines between holiness and danger, self-sacrifice and self-preservation, humor and heartache, Ugly Music pushes boundaries and asks us to re-examine what we think we know. But reflection only comes after setting the book down; to hold it and read it is to be swept along in its thrilling, disquieting melody.”

• Heavy Feather Review, Book Reviews

  “Ugly Music is a book that seeks to engage with its themes at all levels, and with language that is clear, direct, and unapologetic, attempts to remind us that nothing is, nor should be, beyond poetry’s grasp.”

• Merrimack Valley Magazine, Summer Reading AND Book reviews

  “Perhaps the loudest voice within Ugly Music is one that continually resists erasure and repeats emphatically: I am here. I am still here. I am alive.”

• TArpaulin Sky Press, What I’m reading now…by oliver Baez bendorf

  “In Ugly Music [by Diannely Antigua], the body desires, betrays, and makes everything possible, even pleasurable, despite the mind…These poems are irreverent, lucid, and intimate while staying in motion.”

• Jasminne Mendez on 10 Afro-Latinx/Black Latinx Books & Poems you need right now

  When I interviewed her for the Plátano Poetry Cafe series, Diannely described her work in the following way: “My writing style is like a mother possum with babies on her back caught in headlights while trying to cross the road late at night. At first the sight is rather frightening--a cluster of beady eyes staring back at you, long rat-like tails following behind. But it then grows hauntingly beautiful when you realize even the weirdest of things exist on this earth and deserve to live. My poetry is like that, born out of strangeness with an instinct to survive.”

• Luna Luna Magazine, Poetry Weekly—DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s “IN SUBURBIA”

Do you need protection
 
or a father? When you stick your fingers
in the darkest hole, you feel almost feminine.
 
You tell the unborn to stay put.

• LIttle Infinite, Body POetics: 11 Poets on the Body—DIANNELY ANTIGUA’S “DIARY ENTRY #16: ABOUT USING MY BODY”

Repeat after me: I am the ocean. I am a liver. I am
the bracelet on my wrist.

• LIttle Infinite, 9 online Poetry Journals to read on a rainy Weekend Morning—Poetry by Diannely Antigua

  If you’re into poetry, feminism, magic, and identity, the poetry journal I founded, Luna Luna, is your go-to. We are committed to diverse voices, diverse styles, and presenting poetry in a beautifully, aesthetically pleasing space. You’ll find all the new poetry right here. Recommended reads: Poems by Diannely Antigua 

• STAY THIRSTY MAGAZINE, POets of Song and Silence, FALL 2017

  “Diannely Antigua is a poet of experience, of the tangible world. She is the poet on Myrtle Avenue observing a man stealing strawberries from the fruit stand. She is a poet of things that ring with the past, surrounded by memories of This Old House and The Brady Bunch alongside those of molestation and pain.”