Good Monster

“This isn’t an apology but rather a confession: / I loved your body before I was born.” These are the first lines of “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua,” the opening poem in Antigua’s collection, Good Monster, whose focus is the body, both wounded and whole, and the experiences that have led the speaker to see herself as a monster.

Through richly layered images and precise language, Antigua conveys the speaker’s growing self-awareness as she comes to terms with a formative childhood trauma:

What a revolution to say
No.
Sponge, don’t touch my elbow
No.
Soap, don’t trail down my leg to my feet, to my big toe
No.
Towel, don’t dry me
No.
Underwear, don’t put your cotton mouth on
No.
I wish I could have said it that day.

This series of statements from the poem “I’m Surprised at My Tolerance” serve as an entry point, for the reader, into the “damned day of the unforgettable punishment of touch– / trespass of a nine-year-old body, / his forty-five-year-old grip.” The poem reopens emotional scars associated with touch and with everyday objects that attain an ominous meaning in the context of sexual violence.

Throughout Good Monster, Antigua brings her younger self to life on the page; the poems included in the series “Diary Entry,” the poet points out in her notes, “are collages written with lines collected from thirty-six-and-counting personal journals I’ve kept since age nine.” In each poem in the series, the speaker interacts with her inner monster. The more she gets to know it, the more she gets to know herself:

It was after my 22nd birthday            when a monster rose
             to greet me from the confines                of the basement.
    She was a secret                     friend, liked cookies and beer
                            Once, I read her
a book about a boy                   who bribed girls in dresses
             to climb coconut trees.