Winner of the 2020 Whiting Award & YESYES BOOKS PAMET RIVER PRIZE
Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music is a cacophonous symphony of reality, dream, trauma, and obsession. It reaches into the corners of love and loss where survival and surrender are blurred. The poems span a traumatic early childhood, a religious adolescence, and later a womanhood that grapples with learning how to create an identity informed by, yet in spite of, those challenges. What follows is an exquisitely vulgar voice, unafraid to draw attention to the distasteful, to speak a truth created by a collage of song and confession, diary and praise. It is an account of observation and dissociation, the danger of simultaneously being inside and outside the experiences that mold a life. Ugly Music emerges as a story of witness, a realization that even the strangest things exist on earth and deserve to live.
From the WHITING AWARD Selection Committee:
For Diannely Antigua, the body is a site of trauma and awe; it is at once magical and damaged…She chronicles the subtle evolution of a yearning girl into a passionate, political woman. The speakers are brash and savvy but also vulnerable, discovering secrets as they journey through a past that unfolds perpetually. Each poem is meticulously shaped by a formal and aesthetic vision that already feels authoritative.
To read more from the Whiting Foundation…
PrAise for Ugly Music
Diannely Antigua’s Ugly Music is a beautiful disturbance of erotic energy. This debut counters the pull of thanatos with the effervescent allure of pure imagination, and everything is dangerously alive. Antigua’s seduction is both intellectual and physical, a force strong enough to counter the emotional pains recounted here—an abandoning father, trespassed bodies, pregnancies lost, wanted, feared. At times the speaker of these poems trespasses on her own body, as if to say a body is both precious and to be ruined, used, used up. At its deepest song, this is a theological protest and investigation by a speaker wrestling with faith and fathers, with unapologetic desire. These poems have found a way to circumvent the most precarious silences, to boast and to rue.
— Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours
THE UGLY MUSIC SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
With a song for every poem, listen to the playlist in order for the full musical experience…