Congratulations to Katie Berta on the publication of her first poetry collection! retribution forthcoming is available now from Ohio University Press or your local bookstore. You can attend the book’s launch in Arizona on Monday, April 15th at 7 p.m. at Changing Hands Tempe (6428 S McClintock Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283), which will feature Dexter Booth and Justin Petropoulos as co-readers.
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.
retribution forthcoming is the recipient of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize! That is only the beginning of the praise it has received:
“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 an exhaustion of the patriarchal clutch on society as well as the stark realities of womanhood, poethood, and traumas rife with contention and devastation to the human psyche.”
Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones
“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.”
Sally Ball, author of Hold Sway
Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, retribution forthcoming, won the Hollis Summers Prize and will be published by Ohio University Press in 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Bennington Review, among other magazines. She has received residencies from Millay Arts, Ragdale, and The Hambidge Center, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She is the managing editor of The Iowa Review and teaches literary editing and poetry at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University. You can find out more about Katie on her website.
at Mac will be reads from her first work of poetry at the Tempe location of Changing Hands Bookstore 6428 S McClintock Dr, Tempe, AZ 85283 at 7 pm on February 10th. The event will include some performance pieces / compositions taken from the book. Performances are by ‘mac and the kat’ (Cat Mac and Kat O’Malley) singing and playing accordion, guitar and cajon. This is part of Changing Hands Bookstore’s Friday Poetry series. This event is free and open to the public.