Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her second poetry collection, Good Monster, is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive that title.
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Ugly MusicFrom"Modern Elegy"
The last time I cried to your picture
was the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.
It was about her and you and how
all the things I could touch would disappear,
like your hand or dirty boxers on the floor,
or the liver spots on her arms, the space
of her missing tooth.
I’ve been having that dream again.
The one where I make a fortune selling my used underwear
and I buy her a tombstone.
Ugly Music: -
Ugly MusicFrom"Self-Portrait, 1996"
Once, her mother twisted her hair into pigtails
and the little caveman untwisted them,
but only for the boy when he asked,
lefty scissors cutting the elastics with a curl
or more snipped too soon. Neanderthal,don’t civilize your jaw. Let your chin
hang longer than this frame.
Ugly Music: -
Ugly MusicFrom"Praise to the Boys"
On Thursdays the boys played basketball
in the church parking lot
while Sister Priscilla taught the girls
to sew on buttons, stitch hems, iron collars.
She’d lean her rigid body to guide
my hands at the machine, her cabbage breath
lingering as she walked to the next girl.
God lingered too. God watched
my hands feed the needle blue cloth bits at a time. He
watched my mouth, knew where I’d put it next, on the end
of a thread before pulling it through the eye.
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 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
“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.” —Emily Pérez, RHINO Poetry
“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.” —Abriana Jetté, Stay Thirsty Magazine
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. 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.