Katie Berta’s collection retribution forthcoming is one of the strongest debuts I have read in years, a book that wields vulnerability and humor in its remarkable poems.
Claire Wahmanholm wrote of the book:
“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.”
In her own words, here is Katie Berta’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection retribution forthcoming:
In some ways, the poems in retribution forthcoming can be read as a kind of coming-of-age narrative specific to a girl in her twenties. The music included here reflects my own musical history—and the way it’s bound up in the ways I thought and think, and the way that’s reproduced in my poems.
The Fall – C.R.E.E.P.
My book is populated, in part, with creeps (it’s also populated with dear friends, my husband, my dog, other poets, more). My favorite irony of this song is that The Fall was introduced to me in 2005 or 2006 by a boy who later stalked me around my college campus, finally shoving a little packet of poems he’d written about me under the door of my dorm room before running off into the night, yelling loud enough that my roommate and I were startled even though our room was on our dorm’s the second floor. I recently joked on Twitter: “Maybe everyone who deals with the romantic interest of men has a story that’s like, ‘Yeah! He told me all about Mark E. Smith then stood outside my dorm room screaming haha.’” I still have the poems, in the little envelope they came in, buried in my office. “These are up for grabs,” he’d scrawled on the envelope’s lip. I think Mark E. Smith likely wrote this song relating to the creep rather than the crept on, which may only make it more apt.
Miya Folick – Pet Body
This song says so much so succinctly—about alienation from the self, about a certain kind of self-objectification, there’s not a lot to add: “I’m just a sack of flesh, don’t take me too seriously,” says Folick. “I am worrying, mostly, while tapping little parts of a lit screen./The lights change, which makes it look like the images/are moving,” says I. There are plenty of ways we treat ourselves like we’re adjunct to some realer self, which must be observed by others—the internet, with its constant observation, is good for bringing that “real” self into being.
Oingo Boingo – On the Outside
I worked at the Steak n Shake near the now-dead Chapel Hill Mall in Akron, Ohio from age fifteen to eighteen, when I went to college and my parents moved to Indianapolis and I started working at a new Steak n Shake near another midwestern mall that would eventually die. The Chapel Hill Mall, where I once saw Lebron James getting out of a Hummer to go to the movies, still in high school but drafted by the Cavs. There, I met Adam Knabe, a dishwasher in his twenties, who listened to NPR in the store’s back rooms and taught me a lot about movies, driving us both to Cleveland to watch screenings of spaghetti westerns (“Why are they called that?” I asked him) or whatever art film he was interested in. Years later, Adam was kicked out of his parent’s house and had to drive across the country to live with his other parent, if I remember correctly. By that time, I was at college, living in a dorm with two girls I’d been paired with algorithmically, and who I was culturally unsuited to fit in with. Were they both wealthy? At that time, I didn’t consider class our main difference—they were both in sororities and became fast friends. They taught me to like Madonna and I didn’t teach them to like anything at all. Adam asked if he could stay on my dorm’s futon on his way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he was headed, but I said no—I’d just moved in with these girls and they seemed way too normie to accept Adam as overnight guest—maybe he could stop in and watch a movie with me instead? He did, and brought a DVD of The Forbidden Zone, the 1980 film with music by Oingo Boingo (starring Danny Elfman is Satan), a movie that made me so uncomfortable (sitting on the futon with Adam, who was so stressed out he was almost stuporous, my roommates in their lofted dorm beds above us, trying, I assume, to pretend they weren’t paying attention, while on screen Gisele Lindley, dressed in just tighty whities, a tiara, and pearls, pranced around flapping her arms like a chicken), I am too terrified to return to it. There’s a lot to object to in the film—and because I can’t bring myself watch it again, I don’t get to understand whether what’s blatantly racist, homophobic, or otherwise problematic in the film was included to make an argument about the origins of American entertainment (my 18-year-old self was not prepared to take on this question). Oingo Boingo often says the opposite of what their point is (see the song “Little Girls”), committing to a bit to articulate something. No matter the movie’s intention, this experience might be a core of my outsiderism (outside of my roommates, certainly, and outside of Adam, as he showed me a film that made me recoil in every way), and the feeling of watching the film while being watched is at the center of many of my poems. My favorite part of this song, the one included in this list, is the line of the refrain: “This is where it all begins/on the outside looking in.” I think it, everything, begins there for me, too.
Thao & the Get Down Stay Down – The Feeling Kind
I like a voice that isn’t perfectly even, crystalized. I mean literally and poetically. Thao Nguyen can really sing and sometimes defaults to the nasal head voice that pervaded the indie music sung by women in the 2010s (no shade—I love her). This song, though, is husky, stays a little off-key, and the lyrics are full of weird syntactical inversions (“You have got your worry, early death enough/No more other reasons, you got plenty of”) that can’t help but remind me of John Berryman (my favorite, from Love & Fame: “Take my vices alike with some//my virtues, if you can find any”). “Kiss the dog of the feeling kind,” I sing to my dog. I don’t think my poems reach for the same imperatives—Thao demands joy, to “kiss the mouth of the feeling kind”—but they’re concerned with the stuff Thao is concerned with: “human troubles in the modern times.” And, of course, as a poet, I am the “feeling kind” from which this song takes its title.
Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No/I Got Life
You can find several versions of Simone singing this song on YouTube—there’s a version like this one, the one included in this playlist, which is speedy and loud, and another that’s slow, quiet, and devastating. In both versions, Simone’s litany of lack builds until it’s almost intolerable—“What have I got?/Why am I alive anyway?/What have I got/that nobody can take away?” Simone asks at the song’s height. The crisis—existential, racialized, and gendered—reaches its peak and requires her to provide answers, defiantly. The counter-litany—”Got my hair, got my head/got my brains, got my ears/got my eyes, got my nose/got my mouth”—is what always makes me break down when listening to this, and especially to this version of the song, with its furious speed and urgency. Simone—and her body—are her own reason to live. I think this song provides a counterpoint to the distressing insistence of nothingness in the Man Man song that comes later in the playlist.
Rasputina – Incident in a Medical Clinic
In 2003 or 2004, I rode shotgun in Lynnette Bridenthal’s eggplant Ford Escort from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio to Coventry, where Rasputina was playing the Grog Shop. This was really Lynette’s thing, and I was skeptical (does “cello goth rock” sound good to a 17-year-old from the suburbs who primarily listens to Belle and Sebastian?), but in Coventry, we could visit Big Fun, the now-defunct vintage toy store which included—early 2000s indie kid gold—a photo booth; incentive enough. I still have the pictures somewhere. At the start of the show, the band made everyone sit on the bar’s clammy floor. They were dressed, of course, in the period costume mishmash that is their signature. I find a YouTube video from this show or another right around the same time shot from directly beneath Melora Creager’s cello, the videographer seemingly sitting on the ground right next to the Grog Shop’s low stage. I didn’t know that the show would introduce me to a band that would hook into my identity, that I would continue listening to them for (so far) the next twenty years—but their drama and humor have never gotten old for me, and I think you can find their inheritance in this book. “Quite unbelievably,/I want someone to be sweet to me/when I am in absolutely horrible pain” is the line that prompted me to include this song in this playlist—and I hear it’s echo in my own line, from the poem “Birthday”: “As a poet,/all I know how to say is “Ow, ow, ow.”
Kimya Dawson – Year 10
I love this song, but almost balked at including it. Is sincerity currently dead or alive again? This is a tonality I contain—and that contains me.
Devendra Banhart – Kantori Ongaku
I am nineteen and drunk in Cleveland again, watching Devendra Banhart bounce up and down amongst an honestly sparse crowd. A picture, taken from an Interview magazine feature, of him making a pained/orgasmic face and pressing his pecs together, hangs, at this very same moment, on the wall of my dorm room. I loved him and felt the charge of his closeness as he quit the stage and, instead, sang amongst us commoners. Though, at this time of my life, all drunkenness was accompanied by a kind of vagueness (at parties, I’d have a few beers then sit on the floor, talking to no one) that meant I couldn’t move nearer to him. This memory is charged with that floating feeling. As I finished writing this book, I dreamed of using Banhart’s line “All the death in my house makes it easy to shop online” as an epigraph. A different kind of floating, in this song, is expressed as capitalist consumption. My own version of this phenomenon appears throughout my book—but maybe most succinctly in the poem title “Because I want to die, I go to Nordstrom Rack.”
Man Man – Van Helsing Boombox
CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” was my ringtone for many of the years people used whole songs as ringtones—even now, when I hear it, I feel the adrenal surge of needing to answer the phone. The reason I loved the song was the reason anyone must love the song—the tension between the lyrics and their chipper deployment, which, depending on the listener, is funny, sad, scary, or, at least, expressive of fear. The dissonance between the lyrics and the music makes the song more emotionally resonant (speaking of, Rasputina has a cover of the song that matches the tone of the music to that of the lyrics, and though I love their version, it’s less effective than the original because of this). Man Man (a band I discovered with aforementioned friend, Lynette, when she asked a record store employee which CD she should buy. Man Man was his definitive answer. I told the guy I wasn’t going to buy it, but would burn it from Lynette later, which humiliated her) has many songs that use this technique, especially in their later, poppier albums. “Van Helsing Boombox” is from Six Demon Bag, the album I burned from Lynette. The tune is vaudevillian or carnivalesque or like something a pirate would sing, but the speedy refrain, “When anything that’s anything becomes nothing that’s everything/and nothing is the only thing you ever seem to have,” is devastating. The song invites belting, invites dancing, which might be the only thing to do in the face of an existential lose-lose. Hopefully a poem or two of mine invites the same.
Le Tigre – Get Off the Internet
This is what the speaker of my book demands of the speaker of my book.
Katie Berta’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Cincinnati Review, the Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other places. She is the managing editor of the Iowa Review and teaches literary editing and poetry at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University.