Katie Berta's debut poetry collection, retribution forthcoming, won the Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in March. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, 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 a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College.

Other poems on the web by Katie Berta:
"How Is a River like a Woman the Poets Want to Know"
"[Valuing sincerity most of all]"
Three poems
"In Lieu of Talking to God I Write This"
Two poems
"My Basement"
"[To be a child again.]"
"[I was bored of the brunch of it.]"
Two poems

Katie Berta's Website.

About retribution forthcoming:

"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

"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 retribution forthcoming—is how interiority gnashes its sharp teeth outside the skull. Berta's poems are brutal in their honesty, compounding in their brilliance, and display the power of the mind—when infiltrated by a wounding world—and the mess, the necessary ruckus, that ensues."
—Felicia Zamora

"I can't help but feel that the title of Katie Berta's riveting, painful, and frequently hilarious book anticipates not the downfall of some famously (or privately) detested figure (or figures) but rather a punitive backlash against the speaker of these very poems, foreordained the moment she started to speak. You may hold in your hand the comeuppance of a criminal! Such is the cycle of negative self-talk Berta enacts and scrutinizes, with her 'terrible brain,' gripped by both our era's asceticism (with its drive toward nothingness) and a craving for connection and intimacy that has existed presumably from the first human snub. 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. While Berta reckoningly excavates the 'truth beneath an I' (and whether she can even believe in such a truth), her deeper search is for self-forgiveness, clarity, and joy. Can a book about rape and self-squeamishness and the twenty-first century's alluringly pervasive threats (everywhere-to-everything) uplift us? Yes."
—Sally Ball