Description

Sixteen RiversPress, paperback

Publication Date:May 2, 2021

Stella BeratlissDust Bowl Venusanimates Californias Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus, an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love. Marked with sass and grit and grace, Beratliss imagistic associations jolt and jump cut in powers of ten. These poems stir us with the urgency of the Anthropocene, excite a thicket of nerves, and form a mycorrhizal web that connects us to the mantle of deep time. Rosa Lane, author ofChouteaus ChalkandTiller North

The poems in Stella BeratlissDust Bowl Venusring with the clarity of a shovel strike against stone, each line cracking against the next, igniting spark after glorious spark. And yet, like the seasonal lake bed on which Modesto sits, like the many hands making mud out of dry soil,; every poem aches toward tenderness. In one poem, Beratlis asks What grows here? before revealing the bountyheirloom tomatoes, holy basil, kindnessthat can be coaxed from this city of drought. But darker things grow here, too: a tumor the consistency of a potato, fear, terror that builds cell by sticky cell. Here, to grow, and to love, is to risk vulnerability. These bone and ligament narratives of grief and yearning, illness and healing, perseverance and resistance, beat with so much heart in this fiercely beautiful book. Erin Rodoni, author ofBody, in Good LightandA Landscape for Loss