Ugly Music

by Diannely Antigua

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936919642
Publisher:	YesYes Books
Publication date:	05/15/2019
Pages:	99
Sales rank:	835,801
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Self-Portrait as Nostalgia 1

Verse

Re-Education 5

Day of Pentecost 6

Ars Poetica 8

Praise to the Boys 9

Diary Entry #9: Undoing 10

Beauty Lesson 11

Golden Shovel with Solstice 13

Self-Portrait, 1996 15

Diary Entry #4: Atonement 16

Before Diagnosis 17

Diary Entry #11: Still Life with Christmas 18

Diary Entry #4: Ghazal 19

Chorus

First Ode 21

Misconception 22

In the Country Where My Parents Met in a Taxicab 24

Picked 25

Separate 27

Diary Entry #16: About Using My Body 28

In Suburbia 29

Diary Entry #1: Testimony 30

Some Notes on Love 31

Afterward 32

Diary Entry #20: Prognosis 33

Verse

Strawberry Moon 35

Ode to a Lapkin 37

Diary Entry #8: S elf-Improvement 39

Diary Entry #16: Dysmorphia 40

Brujena 41

Suggested Sad Songs for Broken Hearts 42

Trigger Points 43

There Is Nothing 44

Chorus

Equinox 47

It's So Pretty to Drunk Cry on a Subway Platform 48

Diary Entry #24: Bargaining 49

Post-Concussion 50

Of Highrise 88 51

Diary Entry #14: Navigating 52

The One with the Cat and the Hospital 54

Bridge

Songs of Babylon 57

Alabama 58

Ode to First Kiss 60

Portrait of El Jefe 62

Immigration Story 64

Modern Elegy 66

Something Like a Psalm 67

Chorus

After Reading Sharon Olds 69

Something Dies in Me Every Month 71

Diary Entry #22: Vows 72

When Booty Call Turns into Love 73

Mistakes 74

Ode That Doesn't Pass the Bechdel Test 76

Aubade with Solar Eclipse 77

Frying Eggs on the Sidewalk Was the First Lie 78

Outro

Diary Entry #1: Revisitation 81

How I Survived: An Erasure 82

Diary Entry #30: Regression 84

Diary Entry #17: Ibiza 85

When I Try to Explain 86

Variations on a Theme 88

Everything's Been Said 91

Notes 95

Acknowledgments 97