New from Stella Beratlis, whose first collection, Alkali Sink, was a 2016 nominee for the Northern California Book Awards alongside collections by Juan Felipe Herrera, Gary Snyder, Joshua Clover, Ellery Akers, and John Shoptaw. 

The poems in Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus ring 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 bounty—heirloom tomatoes, holy basil, kindness—that 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 of Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss

Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus animates California’s Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus,
an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love. With sass and grit and grace, Beratlis’s craft is brilliant in its imagistic associations that 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 of Chouteau’s Chalk and Tiller North

Dust Bowl Venus, by Stella Beratlis, can be ordered directly from Sixteen Rivers Press:
https://sixteenrivers.org/authors/stellaberatlis/

It is also available through our distributor, Small Press Distribution:

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781939639257/dust-bowl-venus-poems.aspx

Contact the author for an interview at stellaberatlis@sixteenrivers.org.

For a list of readings and author events, visit the Sixteen Rivers website: https://sixteenrivers.org/category/readings-events/

Information about Sixteen Rivers is available at this link: https://sixteenrivers.org/about/.

If you have questions or would like more information, contact Jacqueline Kudler, Publicist, at jackiekudler@sixteenrivers.org.