These award-winning poems combine a trauma narrative with a fast-paced, humorous, feminist, and anticapitalist voice.
Influenced by Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Rachel Zucker, and other poets of the New York school, the poems in Retribution Forthcoming blend a talky, quick, funny voice with candid examinations of gender norms, class pressures, and the existential. Their speaker explores her mortality anxiety through her experiences of gendered exploitation, reflecting on bodily autonomy and the nexus of violences that women face.
Using oblique and direct strategies, these poems recount sexual coercion, the ways consumerist society reinforces and reifies gender conformity and performativity, and the psychological ramifications of these abuses of power. Retribution Forthcoming examines selfhood, consciousness, and mortality as they intertwine with our identities and the ways those identities are politicized. At its core, though, this book is an account of sexual assault and its aftermath, exploring how trauma interacts with belief and our ability to trust others and ourselves.
"retribution forthcoming fuses the abject with the sincere, the tender with the perverse. Katie Berta's voice is straight-up. Barefaced. 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…. What I admire-what rattles me in delicious ways, what makes me say Damn about retribu
