In a 2014 interview with Spin, rock icon Courtney Love said of Hole’s album Live Through This, “I put a lot of energy into the music because it was the place I could put my energy. And the title of the record is not a prediction of the future. It’s, like, fucking live through what I already lived through, you motherfuckers! … You try it—because it ain’t fun.” Love’s sentiments on artistic expression—and the efforts involved therein—could easily be the epigraph to Diannely Antigua’s second collection of poems Good Monster, published by Copper Canyon Press in May. Antigua, the author of Ugly Music, which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, is a confessional poet who plumbs the depths of her psyche with fierce attention to the line and to form. Much like Love’s dare “you try it,” the poems in Good Monster challenge us to peruse what Antigua’s protagonist has lived through, including sexual abuse, suicide attempts, and psychiatric stays. While the content of Good Monster traffics in sundry traumatic experiences, Antigua intersperses the collection with sestinas, sonnets, and centos of her own diaries (kept since age nine) that demonstrate her writerly acuity and formal aplomb.
“This isn’t an apology but rather a confession” begins Antigua’s opening poem “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua.” The poem details a suicide attempt by the “I” before expounding:
I’d like to say
I stopped there. A year later I tried it again, ritual
of pills and mirror and bed, and now the story
of the brown babies, all lost before they were lost.
And you wept as I held you once more, understood
this was my task all along, to kill. And what a love to give
in to my violence, your breath weaker, diaphragm
lulled to sleep.
Though the narrative of “Someday” is brutal, Antigua’s ingenious lineation debones the story’s violence with fierce control and restraint. By dropping “I stopped there” to its own line, the poem flirts with two opposing ideas: the narrator definitively stops her suicide attempts—or she doesn’t. Of course, the reader always already understands the answer is the latter, given the poem’s title. Nonetheless, the momentary cognitive dissonance intimates the mindset of someone attempting to convince herself that this moment of self-harm is, indeed, the last. “And what a love to give / in to my violence” similarly offers a brief moment of emotional respite before plunging the reader back into the depths of a body besieged by self-hatred, helplessness, or psychological distress.
Joining the ranks of recent publications like Megan Fernandes’s I Do Everything I’m Told (2023) or Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), Good Monster similarly utilizes poetic forms to grapple with the precarity of survival and modern life writ large. Roughly every ten poems, Antigua features three “Sad Girl Sonnets,” all numbered, much like the repeated titular poems of Hayes’s aforementioned book. Additionally, Good Monster features a series of “Diary Entry #” poems, a title series familiar to those who have read Antigua’s first book. In this way, the musical motif persists, with Good Monster serving as Ugly Music’s sequel. Similar stories recur (an abusive stepfather, addiction, bad sex), as do similar images or lines.
To wit, towards the end of Ugly Music, in “When I Try to Explain,” Antigua writes, “hearing the creak of your door open at night, / your mother coming to check the 10 // toes, 10 fingers on your adult body. You / close your eyes and give her the comfort of numbers.” In “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua,” the poem begins with a similar act. As Antigua notes, “I loved your body before I was born. // I counted your future fingers and toes.” Here, in her most recent iteration, the narrator becomes a modern Scylla, multi-headed, assuming the role of both child and mother. Later, in “A Hundred and Then None,” Antigua asks, “Will I be a good mother? I can’t forgive her / soft harm.” In Good Monster, the so-called protector can not offer any comfort or safety. Yet, even in Ugly Music that sense of being cleft in two (or conjoined) glimmers with the line break on “You / close your eyes”—the self is physically separated from its own action on the page.
And yet, despite all the brutalities of surviving assault or mental illness, there is also love within Good Monster, plain and unadorned, but real. In “Another Poem About an Ex, But Really It’s About Me,” Antigua ends the poem by writing,
The part of the poem that’s about me is this:
the poem is already about me, this keen eye
ready to find another moment to make
the heart swell. I find something to love
like I find air in a room. I just walk in.
“Another Poem” evokes the “I” and the “eye,” the subject and the writer depicting her own experiences, however heightened or mundane. What better description for writing a poem than “I find something to love / like I find air in a room. I just walk in”? A stanza is also a room. I find many things to love in the rooms of Good Monster. Pain (and much more rarely, peace) permeates every surface and space.
Though Antigua writes in “Monster is Good at Breakups,” “Who wouldn’t be addicted to feeling?” the poems throughout Good Monster do not only elicit affective, embodied responses, but also intellectual astoundment: at their lyrical prowess, ribald asides, and skill. In the face of unimaginable pain, sometimes the need to feel something, anything, seems like the only option to remind us that we are (thankfully) alive. Other times, making sense of hardship or trauma necessitates a need for form. The restriction of structure allows us a foundation of control from which we can understand our behavior and history whether it is bad sex, cutting, or using substances with abandon. As Antigua elucidates, “We can’t heal / or hurt alone.” So, too, can we not heal—or hurt—without a combination of the confessional and the measured. Good Monster offers both, melding the mind and heart with candor and care. Sometimes it’s hell on earth to suffer—or survive. Antigua’s poems may confess to near death experiences, but she exists within the present continuous, the ongoing, the now.
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