Katie Berta, retribution forthcoming: poems

 

I Will Put Your Name Right in the Poem

Don’t be offended—I will put your name right in the poem
because what you do is who you are and we can all see what
that is. Or—don’t be offended—I will put your name right
in the poem because I need you to see that you don’t
scare me anymore. Hello, little man. Why are you so upset
to see your name in the poem? Did you not say “whore”?
did you not say, “Hope you die soon”? I will put your name
right in the poem because I have saved all the receipts
for just this occasion. I will put your name right in the pom
because I don’t care if it fucks your ass up, my dude.
I will put your name right in the poem. Just wait for my poem,
little baby. Here it comes.

There is a force behind and within the lyrics of Iowa poet Katie Berta’s full-length debut, retribution forthcoming: poems (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2024), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, as selected by Claire Wahmanholm. Across a lyric simultaneously stark and lush, Berta offers a stunning and expansive display of articulating devastating events and an enormous heart, one that no longer wishes to hold back. As the poem “I lived in a beautiful place” begins: “and then in a place of bitter cold. / I had a terrible brain. When the winter came, / it brought with it a series of complications. / Always having to put on a hat and coat. / Snow falling over the tops of your boots. / Many thoughts over which I had no control.” 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. “The earth is short. Reason / is short. Each person’s extends / up over her head,” the poem “Cave,” near the end of the collection, begins, “peters out / as the air gets thin.” The poems carry enormous wounds and anxiety, populated by rapists, ex-boyfriends, rattlesnakes and the body of a dead motorcyclist, most of which hold titles as warnings for content, whether “After I was raped the second time, I lost forty pounds,” “The women I thought of as popular in high school / are having babies who die” or “The NY Times Real Estate Section Publishes Pictures / inside the Expensive Apartment Belonging / to Your Ex-Boyfriend and His New Wife.” Composed as short essays or monologues, there are poems here that are utterly devastating, all presented in such a clear, straightforward lyric, describing heartbreak, sexual assault, emotional brutality, thoughts of retribution alongside elements of absolute, open-hearted beauty, working through and across the worst of things toward something better. The poem, for example, “Remembering that time in my life / when I used to think a lot about innocence,” includes, towards the end: “Something about it touches / me, touches a raw, open place, the way a man / never would. / Is it the core rushing up to take the place / of all that stuff, all that was outside of me, entering / almost without permission?” It is a lot to digest, and even more to process, but throughout, both author and narrator have clearly realized they deserve better, and these poems are the direct result of that discovery and new ownership. As that same poem offers, to close: “Here is my boyfriend, / engaged, as usual, in the garden. I watch him from the window / as he moves, / like a lake does, in the wind.”