When my upstairs neighbor invites me to her baby shower, I feel guilty about forgetting to bring in my recycling bins,again. I am a bad neighbor, but she’s going to be a mother so she’ll have to practice forgiveness on someone first. Usually,I’m a people pleaser. I am a people. I was born with all of the people I could ever create inside me. I tryto forgive them-their dirty handprints on my skirt, their towels left on the bathroom floor. We blessed the babywhile we tied around our wrists one long, red string. For a moment, the string connected us-wives, mothers,and me, neither-until it didn’t, until the scissors severed us, made a bracelet of the blood string. I told the baby,I give you this wrist. The world will break all your blessings if it wants, and believe me, baby, most of the time, it wants.
Blessing the Baby
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- May 1, 2024
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“Blessing the Baby” from GOOD MONSTER: by Diannely Antigua.
Published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Diannely Antigua.
Used with permission of the publisher, Copper Canyon Press.
All rights reserved.
Tony Ochoa
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 BA 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, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.
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.
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