Diannely Antigua Selected Works

Poignant and guttural, this collection chronicles 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's debut collection, Ugly Music, is a cacophonous symphony of reality, dream, trauma, and obsession. 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.