Order at Ohio University Press
Cover art by Kent Corbin, cover design by Beth Pratt.
reviews & press
The Academy of American poets features retribution forthcoming in its National Poetry Month reading list, April 2024.
Largehearted Boy features a book playlist for retribution forthcoming in their Book Notes series, April 2024.
rob mclennan features an interview with me in his “12 or 20 (second series),” March 2024.
Arizona State University features faculty publications, March 2024.
Thank you to rob mclennan who featured a review of retribution forthcoming on his blog, February 2024.
Poets & Writers announces the prize, October 2023.
Creative writing graduate wins Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, OHIO News, May 2023.
Ohio University Press announces the prize, February 2023.
events
In Highland Park, CA on Friday, August 3rd, 5 p.m.
I’m reading with fiction writer Ricco Villanueva Siasoco and fellow poet Chloe Martinez at North Fig Bookshop (6040 N. Figueroa St. Highland Park, CA 90042) on August 3rd at 5 p.m. Join us!
Friday, April 26th, 7 p.m.
Reading with poet Margaret Yapp at Prairie Lights (15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City IA 52240) on April 26th at 7 p.m. Details here.
Monday, April 15th, 7 p.m.
Reading at Changing Hands Tempe (6428 S McClintock Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283) featuring Dexter Booth and Justin Petropoulos! Details here.
AWP 2024
Saturday, February 10th, 2 to 2:30 p.m.
Book signing at the Vermont Studio Center table (T1438) at AWP Kansas City.
Friday, February 9th, 8 to 10 p.m.
Join The Iowa Review and Triquarterly for Triptych: a reading, a screening, an afterparty at the Kansas City Public Library, 14 W. 10th St., Kansas City, MO. 64105. RSVP here.
Thursday, February 8th, 6 to 8 p.m.
retribution forthcoming will be available at the New Ohio Review offsite reading (featuring Sarah Green, Brad Aaron Modlin, K.T. Landon, Jill Michelle, Abby E. Murray, Danielle Batalion Ola, Weijia Pan, Emily Tuszynska, and Adele Elise Williams) at The Big Rip Brewing Company, 216 E 9th Ave, North Kansas City MO 64116. Details here.
Thursday, February 8th, 2 to 2:30 p.m.
Book signing at the New Ohio Review booth (1504) at AWP Kansas City.
Katie Berta’s debut collection, retribution forthcoming, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and is available from Ohio University Press now.
Debut collection finds humor & pleasure in a wounding world.
In the lineage of New York School poets like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, retribution forthcoming does its exploratory work through narrative and lyric modes, by simile and catalogue. By turns oblique and direct, Katie Berta’s poems look vulnerably and honestly at sexual coercion and the psychological fallout of assault. These poems move through academic, public, and domestic spaces—and through the domain of memory—investigating the ways consumerist society reinforces and reifies gender conformity and performativity. The world of these poems and their trauma narrative is woven through and deepened by the heartful speaker’s sense of humor and eagerness to love and trust.
For readers interested in interrogating ecological, capitalist, gendered, and private violence, for sensitive and intuitive listeners, and for lovers of poets like Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Jay Hopler, and Paisley Rekdal, retribution forthcoming is an inspired and visionary debut.
praise
“retribution forthcoming fuses the abject with the sincere, the tender with the perverse. Katie Berta’s voice is straight-up. Bare-faced. Flat-out. She catalogs both the worthwhile and the intolerable, and the result is exhilarating: a killing bite into the marrow of whatever it is we think we’re doing here.”
Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater: Poems
“Katie Berta reminds us, "The world is a fight” and these poems refuse to pull punches. In retribution forthcoming, sarcasm collides with the stark realities of womanhood, poethood, and trauma. In a world that dismisses women and our wounds, and in which sinking “into Nordstrom Rack like a stupor…is an American way of dying,” Berta warns us, “This poem isn't beautiful.” These poems tell ‘the beautiful’ to Sit the f--- down—to make space for discomfort, for the riotous, real and pulsating. These poems become resuscitations of resistance to demolishment and abuse. The internal struggle, the self-admonishment that "I am bad and we are all bad,” in which the voice confronts the complexities of being "Cleaved as I am, divided from my true self," makes these poems irresistible. What I admire—what rattles me in delicious ways, what makes me say Damn about retribution forthcoming—is how interiority gnashes its sharp teeth outside the skull. Berta’s poems are brutal in their honesty, compounding in their brilliance, and display the power of the mind—when infiltrated by a wounding world—and the mess, the necessary ruckus, that ensues.”
Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones
“I can’t help but feel that the title of Katie Berta’s riveting, painful, and frequently hilarious book anticipates not the downfall of some famously (or privately) detested figure (or figures) but rather a punitive backlash against the speaker of these very poems, foreordained the moment she started to speak. You may hold in your hand the comeuppance of a criminal! Such is the cycle of negative self-talk Berta enacts and scrutinizes, with her ‘terrible brain,’ gripped by both our era’s asceticism (with its drive toward nothingness) and a craving for connection and intimacy that has existed presumably from the first human snub. These poems roil with thought and with dogs and with media-glut. They overflow with fear and love; devastating events and numb, weak aftermaths; what to eat, or slather into your insufficient skin: and still their capacities for humor, for tenderness—their raw courage in the face of a virulent internal naysayer—thrill and buoy us. While Berta reckoningly excavates the ‘truth beneath an I’ (and whether she can even believe in such a truth), her deeper search is for self-forgiveness, clarity, and joy. Can a book about rape and self-squeamishness and the twenty-first century’s alluringly pervasive threats (everywhere-to-everything) uplift us? Yes. Katie Berta reaches toward you with her love.”
Sally Ball, author of Hold Sway
