Order at Ohio University Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.

Cover art by Kent Corbin, cover design by Beth Pratt.

upcoming events

In Granville, OH on March 6th

I’m reading and speaking with fellow alumni authors Alison Stine, Derek Mong, and Scott Hylbet at Denison University on March 6th at 4:30 p.m. in the Barney-Davis Hall Boardroom as part of Denison’s Arts ReMix event. Join us!

In Corpus Christi, TX on March 20th & 21st

I’m visiting Texas A & M Corpus Christi on March 20th & 21st as part of their Author’s Day celebration. Join us!

In Kearney, NE on March 24th to 26th

I’m visiting University of Nebraska - Kearney on March 24 to 26 as the Reynolds Visiting Writer. Join us!

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

“Katie Berta’s collection retribution forthcoming is one of the strongest debuts I have read in years, a book that wields vulnerability and humor in its remarkable poems.”

David Gutowski, of Largehearted Boy

“There is a force behind and within the lyrics of Iowa poet Katie Berta’s full-length debut, retribution forthcoming… There is a clarity and a fierce self-protection, entirely finished with the nonsense of others, that is propulsive, across poems that are expansive, slick and scalpel-sharp.”

rob mclennan, of periodicities

“[It’s] as if Sartre’s play No Exit featured different aspects of only one character having a high-stakes, if informal, colloquy. As with that play, we keep reading for the quality of the conversation, which in retribution is unpretentious, perceptive, often sardonically funny, and always intensely searching.”

Erin Redfern for New Ohio Review

“retribution forthcoming compels with its attention to detail, humor, and unwavering eye for the intractable, the horrible. And yet when I read these poems, I don’t feel horrified, at least not completely. Alongside my terror, I feel a welling sense of tenderness—for Berta, for the rats and the snakes of the world, for the neglected and the distracted, for my lonesome self. For all of us, simultaneously alone and in this together.”

Brittany Micka-Foos for Heavy Feather Review

read poems from the collection