Good Monster

Author: Diannely Antigua

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2024)

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land / between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths—a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”—the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When God becomes “a house [she] can’t leave,” language is the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, episodic Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries—an invented form that collages the author’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.