By Erin Redfern

Across the poems in Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming (Ohio University Press, 2024), a self-aware speaker works to come to grips with her complex apprehensions about beauty, identity, virtue, and violence. In an interview with Rob McLennan, Berta affirms that “poems are a place of internal quiet in which I get to explicate what I think and feel without the invading presence of another mind.” The effect is 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.

The collection opens with “Compact,” in which the speaker’s dog “locks him- self // in my boyfriend’s office while we’re gone” and “chews the clothes . . . to smithereens, maybe to keep himself from chewing / himself.” As Berta’s book explores, a person locked in her own mind without recourse to faith in something bigger has nothing to chew but the self. Berta continues, “Asking questions of god is, of course, chewing // yourself. Though, in some situations it’s practical. / Like when some part of you is / what’s caught.” This “cleaved” self reappears throughout the book, and the poems in which it appears run the gamut from everyday absurdity (“Becky! Are you trying to text a different Katie?”) to existential angst (“Batter my heart, you no-personed god”) to traumatized dissociation (“so I went off into the ceiling’s coarseness . . . until it was over”). This cleaving shows up grammatically in the recurring slide between first- and second-person pronouns that characterizes the majority of the poems.

The “divided” speaker is trenchant when tracking the socioeconomic forces that pressure the unedited “self-alone” to split into an acceptable public “lesser self.” She takes understandable umbrage, for example, at academics “who keep saying the word ‘hillbilly,’ which I honestly think of / as a slur.” This line appears in the poem “A magazine article is trying to convince me the bags under my eyes equal cell death,” which continues, “My mother’s family packed into their tiny house. Something about it / felt like a secret when I was a kid. Now, I eat my vegetables. Or I try.” Berta is acutely aware that in her new kale-adjacent life, health and beauty are conflated markers of virtue even in supposedly “serious” circles:

                                                                                       . . . Someone at the conference
                             says the young look clean. The graduate students. Their skin a sort of luminous
                             halo surrounding their bodies. The young and the rich, anyway. In my PhD,
                             Sarah said we all aged like Barack Obama. All that stress. Think about that,
                             but for your whole life.

Ultimately, class leaves its mark on not just bodies, but the texts they produce: “To be really heard, / to have what you say and think / turned into story, is how it feels to be rich” (“The NY Times Real Estate Section Publishes Pictures inside the Expensive Apartment Belonging to Your Ex-Boyfriend and His New Wife”). There, and in the poem “I am trying to drink more water,” Berta’s speaker spurns the “superficial charm” of this bought attention:

                                                          . . . someone
                             will always
                             tell you your poem is beautiful even when it’s not
                             supposed to be because people think
                             that’s all a poem
                             is supposed to be—
                             this poem isn’t beautiful.

Berta’s poems smartly trace the intersection of social status and perceptions of beauty, which they argue is the “most middle class, the most overt, the most Victorian, the most / fashionable of all the virtues, beauty being, we believe, a real reflection / of what one might have spent on what went / into the inside.” Retribution elaborates on this familiar, if here wit-infused, criticism that female beauty under patriarchy signals women’s “pointlessness” as conscious beings while making them targets of sexual violence. More surprising is Berta’s equally fine tracking of the way gendered assumptions and class boundaries preclude access to spiritual practices that might counterbalance the effects of living amid relentless materialism and misogyny. Hinted at in the poem “Getting down on your knees really works,” this critique comes to the fore in the wry, distressing poem “Whoa, am I ever one with this marled basketweave throw in nightshade”:

                             on sale for 66.75 on the West Elm website, and arousing in me a powerful feeling
                             of not just desire, but proximity to wholeness, like, wow, if I could just afford this 66-dollar
                             acrylic throw blanket (usually 89 dollars!) I could feel what I’m reading about in my book
                             by Thich Nhat Hanh—a dissolution of self, the interdependency of my being
                             with the beings of others . . .

The poem then takes us through a recommended spiritual exercise “meant to make familiar / your own dissolution” through the imagined ruin of the body. Coming late in the book, this instruction follows poem upon poem in which the speaker’s body and senses have been “enter[ed] / almost without permission,” her identity dissociated, her relational boundaries dissolved. The speaker has faced a certain kind of ruin, and the “skin, flesh, sinew, teeth, / bones” of the Buddhist exercise look back to a description from the painful poem “After I was raped the second time, I lost forty pounds.” There the speaker recalls, “everyone compared how I was then / to how I was before then. The other day, I saw a picture of what / was my own arm. Like the tiny bones you excavate from the pellet / of an owl, the bones of a mouse.” There is pain in these poems, and an investigation of the idiosyncratic ways we process this pain. Later poems find the speaker exploring her attachment to what is mortal and devoted—her dog, her boyfriend, poetry. This is what steadies her now.

The several poems in Retribution in which the speaker remains an “I,” rather than splitting into an “I” and a generalized “you,” are stand-outs. “My therapist is teaching me” and “I said yes to make sure he used a condom,” which occur back-to-back at the heart of Retribution, and “There is a me under this me who wishes to do lovely in this magnificent,” the penultimate poem, are capacious in their ability to hold a speaker who is conflicted, compromised, but also more confident about her role in interlocking social systems. In “there is a me . . . ,” she writes,

                             I am a truth but also I am a truth beneath an I, like a skin under a skin
                            or layers and layers of clothes, which means I don’t have to listen when
                            someone tells me the truth of my truth on the surface, the skin-truth
                            that doesn’t at all account for the truth that is invisible and living as a
                            skin underneath. Or so I am told.

No doubt Berta’s combination of sharp personal insight and incisive cultural analysis will continue in her future work. I am curious to find out how unified or fragmented the perspective in these next poems will be.

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Erin Redfern’s work has recently appeared in The Shore, Rattle, The Hopkins Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she was a Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. A San Jose native and resident, she has served as poetry judge for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Festival and as a reader for Poetry Center San Jose’s Caesura and DMQ Review. erinredfern.org