Overview

WINNER, 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry! 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.

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9781936919642

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Reviews

"""Reading Diannely Antigua's first collection of poems, Ugly Music (2019), which won YesYes Books's Pamet River Prize, I heard Sleater Kinney's 'Modern Girl' play in my head. Carrie Brownstein sings about how happy she is. Then, halfway through the song, she admits she's lying-the defining emotion of this modern girl's life is not 'a picture of a sunny day' but, rather, a deep and endless hunger."" Muzzle Magazine ""Religion, sex, abuse, mental illness, suicide attempts, praise for the impure, and a fierce drive to make it all sing drive Diannely Antigua's crackling debut, Ugly Music. In her insight-filled interview with Adroit, Antigua says 'My book really should have a disclaimer or a trigger warning' (and perhaps it should), but more jolting than the subject matter is the liminal space in which she holds the reader, somewhere between wanting and not, between desire and devastation."" Rhino Poetry"

Author Information

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 and a 2020 Whiting Award. 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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