Cover Art: Angela Singer
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Digital Version
About Diannely Antigua
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. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Her heart is in Brooklyn.
Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua (Digital)
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About Ugly Music
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.
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
