In Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, Retribution Forthcoming, nothing is sacred—and everything is.
This earnest, probing collection interweaves the everyday with the metaphysical. From skincare to smartphone-scrolling to microwave entrees, Berta interrogates the mundane and the minute to expose the existential crisis simmering underneath. The result is a blurring of boundaries: a confluence of animal and human, self and other, good and bad.
Retribution Forthcoming is a study in contrasts. Many of the poems operate within a duality where concepts are measured against opposites to locate their meaning. Through Berta’s nimble language, description becomes a sinuous sort of digression, a snake eating its own tail. The things measured against become the defining blueprint. Or as Berta wonders, “what is judgment but testing the other against / the template of the self?”
The poem “Trucking towards oblivion, engaged in microscopic pursuits—” crystallizes this dynamic even within the tiny scope of the poem’s title. Berta expounds on the dichotomy of:
the kind of small encounter that requires all your attention, though your truck,
the earth, is hurtling, hurtling through space, on course to end all eggs and nits
and primates, more nuclear than nuclear in its seriousness—
it is sinister to become absorbed, at this late date.
The impending destruction of our planet is held against the everyday act of playing on a phone, of “tapping little parts of a lit screen.” The poem converges on these two states of consciousness, pitting the attention economy against the capitalist economy. Take the factories where the phones are produced: they impel our collective doom simultaneous with a merciful distraction from our anxiety about the forthcoming destruction. Eventually, the speaker interjects, “Ma’am, this is a Wendys”—returning us to our meme-filled present, a signal that we have ranted for too long about too little and too much. Yet, we hurtle on.
In “I still do like a microwave dinner,” we witness the attempted construction of an intact present self out of relics of the past:
How funny to be a child and to survive it, and to live with everything
you made then, everything you made yourself want.
Here I am, still wanting what I wanted, unable to escape
my child-desires, unable to unmake myself as a lonely person,
to fashion a safe, whole thing out of what remains of me. I don’t know,
maybe it’s okay to carry the things I loved back then with me,
to carry their legacy with me as a set of desires I still don’t understand. It’s okay, but sad.
The speaker’s lingering penchant for microwave dinners, a fixature of a childhood marked by neglect, becomes a lens for interrogating loneliness and a lifetime of thwarted expectation. “Okay, but sad” is a fitting coda for so many of the poems in Retribution Forthcoming. Poems that candidly address trauma, estrangement, and rape can get depressing, after all. It’s a credit to Berta that these poems, amid their barefaced realism, also contain a humanizing brightness that does not patronize: a sense that it is okay. But sad.
“I realized skin care would not save my life,” takes on beauty standards and how they acquire meaning through the eyes of the beholder:
ugly has no particular meaning attached to it
until some other person enters the room. Hard not to
crumble under the gaze, knowing what they see. Or
thinking I know. No, it is intractable—the direction
I’m moving in, intractably.
Being perceived begets ugliness. Retribution Forthcoming is chock full of this recognition of being watched, whether that’s by some big man in the sky or the unyielding male gaze. Appearance is yet another comparative blueprint. The result is a dismantling (and, of course, an opportunity to sell something): “A crepiness turns / into something you can stick your finger through, / to your horror, and they’re marketing you argan oil.” And, it is indeed a horror—what we do to our bodies, what has been done to them. With all the despair of a nonbeliever who appeals to God nonetheless, Berta speaks through these poems with a ticking-timebomb urgency. It draws you in and forces you to reckon with what’s impending.
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.
Retribution Forthcoming, by Katie Berta. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, March 2024. 86 pages. $17.95, paper.
Brittany Micka-Foos is the author of the chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the short story collection It’s No Fun Anymore (forthcoming, Apprentice House Press, 2025). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, NonBinary Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Read more at brittanymickafoos.com.
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