I have a confession: I’ve always had some aversion to confessional poetry. It often seemed to me that confessional poets rested too much on their confessions while neglecting their poetics and style, so they might as well be writing prose memoirs. Every bias has exceptions, however, and Diannely Antigua is one of mine.
Antigua’s sophomore collection, Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), continues her “Diary Entry” poems. She notes that the poems are based on more than thirty-five journals—which she has been filling since age nine—and that the number in the poem’s title corresponds to the journal number, giving the reader a rough idea of what age inspired it.
What makes these poems so effective is not their inspiration, however, but rather their praxis. Through skillful use of erasure and collage, Antigua’s diary poems present a somewhat jumbled collection of memory and emotion, the pathos of which no prose memoir could reproduce. The poet invites readers into her process of reconstructing herself after a traumatic fracturing that began in childhood: “Diary Entry #12” (subtitled “The Monster”) begins with the lines, “It was after my 22nd birthday” when “a monster rose” to greet the speaker in the basement. The poem is filled with white space and line fragments scattered over the page, telling of a monster who never sleeps through the night, throws cell phones at walls, mixes drugs, and deals with an unwanted pregnancy. The speaker indicates her changing understanding of the monstrous part of herself but struggles against it. “Once,” one section begins, “I named her Perversion.” The gap between the sections suggests much has been erased in between, but she goes on (with erasure indicated by “[]”), “Once, I named her [] The Accident,” and once there “was no name,” but she “tried to evict her.”
With the theme of sexual abuse by a stepfather and references to pregnancy, the early poem could be inspired by a diary entry about an unwanted pregnancy, but Antigua’s skillful word choices leave it ambiguous. This monster could also be read as the symptoms of PTSD manifesting in the speaker’s behavior. Over five lines, with plenty of white space suggesting details possibly too painful or shameful to share, the poem suggests feelings of inescapability, concluding, “Everywhere, [] is the basement, [] you are the [] only [] piece [] of furniture [] to survive.”
A sense of chronology can be observed in the diary entry poems, though they’re not arranged sequentially. The style isn’t uniform throughout and not all numbers are represented, but a poem like “Diary Entry #5”—subtitled “Self Portrait as Revelations”— features a speaker full of teenage regret about “the basement parties where I became a forgotten church, / when the boys came for pleasure and I asked for mercy.” Seven diaries later, the speaker is twenty-two years old. The later poem “Diary Entry #29” (subtitled “Ars Poetica”) shows a speaker with more worldly views on life in lines like, “It’s true— / the wrong music can be damaging and every photograph / is an elegy” and “A long life is avant-garde—I place mine / on the open shelf, on the edge.”
The eponymous monster is further mentioned in a number of poems, with some having the word in the title and others, such as “Diary Entry #34” (subtitled “Epigenetics”), giving a good idea of the monster’s meaning:
I shower with my clothes on
like I did as a girl with a man
who wanted to be my father,
when I became a little bird, helpless
to affection. Did he make me
a good monster or a bad one?
With numerous mentions of medications and suicide attempts, the speaker continually alludes to their struggles with mental illness but leaves the reader to ponder whether the abuse caused post traumatic issues or if underlying conditions made the speaker particularly vulnerable. As someone with mental health issues including severe depressive episodes, I found this monster a particularly appropriate metaphor for the effects that serious mental health episodes have on your life and the lives of those you love. The speaker’s feelings of detachment are likewise familiar. When pain overwhelms your mind, you don’t always behave as you’d like. It’s easier to grapple with monstrous problems and actions than to acknowledge feeling that the real problem is your existence.
There’s reason to think that Antigua is not done mining her journals for poetic inspiration. While her debut, Ugly Music, featured diary poems with numbers between one and thirty, only eleven journals are referenced. Good Monster includes another eleven books and notes that there are thirty-five books total as of publication, leaving at least thirteen journals from which the author has yet to draw inspiration. While I wouldn’t want to pigeonhole such a talented writer, I’d certainly be interested in more of her story and the speaker’s. The speaker of Ugly Music isn’t shy but, like a singer still finding her voice, letting secrets spill out. The speaker of Good Monster; by contrast, has had more time to ruminate, metamorphize, and come to terms with her psychological demons, acknowledging and shouting out her good monster.
Antigua’s conflicting desires come through from the first poem, the metapoetic “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua,” which begins, “This isn’t an apology but rather a confession: / I loved your body before I was born.” As in the title—inspired by Frank O’Hara’s poem “Someday I’ll Love Frank O’Hara”—it becomes clear that the poem’s speaker is addressing the poet, herself, recounting failed suicide attempts:
Once I opened all the pill bottles,
left them on the dresser, watched you—one, two, three pills at a time—
swallow them in front of the mirror,reflection slipping into bed after,
into the little trap I’d set. Only twenty minuteshad passed when they found you
Both the dislocated speaker and the lines toward the end—such as “in time, I hope to stop trying” and “perhaps, and I’ll forgive you”—convey the speaker’s ambiguous and conflicted sense of self. In contrast, the poem “After My Stepfather Leaves, My Mother Opens the Windows” gives the speaker’s trauma a sense of scale, with stanzas alternating between right and left justification. The stanzas on the left tell of the usual process after her stepfather leaves, continuing from the title:
to let out the smell of Old Spice,
and fish head soup, the leftover
mondongo lingering in the fridge.
This is followed by a couplet on the left and the speaker relating that in “2001, he lingers on the bed, slips / his hand under my shirt,” seven years after a trip to Niagara Falls with her stepfather and sister in 1994. The poem continues with the title conceit on the left, the speaker relating “I threaten my mother with running / away if she lets him come back.” While the left justified stanzas relate how she and her mother cleaned up her stepfather’s mess, the speaker relates on the right side how she learned to parallel park from her stepfather—still around—in 2007; how “in 1992, she [her mother] listens to the radio preacher”; marrying him with the speaker as flower girl in 1997; and suggesting abuse early in the marriage by ending with the preacher leaving a welt on her brother’s head the same year.
As in her debut, Antigua heads off any feelings of confessional monotony by mixing her diary poems with an elegant variety of lesser confessional, more expositional poems. Such poems include “Seasonal Affective,” which uses seasonal metaphors for the mood disorder bearing that name; the frank and earnestly named “People Who Don’t Understand Mental Illness”; and the penultimate “Anniversary,” with its stellar first sentence:
Outside, an abandoned mattress sags with rain
and the driveway turns all sludge when I remember
I could’ve died eight years ago, in a bed
smaller than the one I share with a new lover
who just this morning found another gray hair in my afro,
and before resettling the wiry curl with the others,
kissed the freckle on my forehead.
While Antigua’s debut was divided into sections as if the collection were one long piece of music (Verse, Chorus, Bridge, etc.), Good Monster features untitled sections separated by three triptychs of numbered “Sad Girl Sonnets.” The poet plays with form in these, eliding meter and rhyme but retaining the requisite fourteen lines. The first triptych, “Sad Girl Sonnet #1,” follows the Petrarchan style of octet followed by sestet, while the next is fourteen monostichs that follow Shakespearean style, with logical quartets spilling into each other. The third returns to Petrarchan but breaks lines into couplets.
“Sad Girl Sonnet #9”—the first of the middle triptych—features a single stanza referencing the Bible story of Jacob, who worked seven years for the hand of Rachel but was given her sister Leah instead, then worked seven more years to make Rachel his second wife:
In the Bible, seven years is a short time to grieve,
to work for the same woman. God, I’ve replaced every Leah
with more Leahs. They’re on the screens.
The speaker references the proliferation of pornography on the internet and ends the poem with the same line, alluding to recurring trauma: “I rewind to the part / when the man enters the room. I rewind / to the part when the man enters the room.” The last of the nine poems, a Petrarchan sonnet in couplets, shows the speaker window shopping:
I watch the couples
holding hands as they walk out of each store. They are ads
for a promised life. I want that purse. I want those heels,I want that ring on her finger.
The second half of the poem links these material desires with erotic desire and a desire for salvation, “I search the windows, the alleys, // the internet, for the fingers that will touch me something / prophetic. All I ask is for a death or resurrection.” Many of the poems in this collection show the influence of Christianity on the author’s life: a legacy of an upbringing that includes what she’s called religious abuse, including the radio preacher stepfather mentioned above. An early poem, “Self Portrait as Easter Pamphlet on the Door” borrows from the magazine The Watchtower, suggesting that she was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. It seems the speaker is hoping for a spiritual cleansing of the past in emulation of Christ through the death and rebirth that Easter represents.
Antigua ends the collection with a non-rhyming English sonnet of three quatrains followed by a couplet, referencing the title conceit in “I Buy My Monster Roses.” This poem talks about roses as a means of soothing the speaker’s monster, treating the flower like the romantic symbol they used to be for her, because “I thought the roses / could be a cure.” The image of the speaker plucking each petal seems to call this into doubt, with nothing left but stems and thorns. It’s unclear where the poet will go from here, but there’s hope in her attempts to reconcile with her monster.
With Good Monster, Antigua continues to reconstruct and reveal herself to readers in creative ways. Unlike confessional poetry that seeks simply to shock or elicit sympathy, the playful and interesting forms share hard truths about her life—and life more generally—with grace. Though readers who are triggered by themes of sexual abuse and frank, coarse sexual language should be aware they will find such themes in this collection, Good Monster is a powerful poetry body that shows Antigua’s growth as a poet and the sure potential for more compelling work to come.
