Stella Beratlis

In her second powerful collection of poetry, framed by the lyrics of Modesto-based country-bluegrass songwriter, Hazel Houser, Stella Beratlis explores California’s Great Central Valley, the landscapes of fear and hope in the cancer diagnosis of her daughter, and the landscape of regret—what we have let go and what we have gained from letting go. Beratlis writes that “ghosts/have always been walking / through the spaces of our home,” and she has listened to these ghosts. This book is filled with imagery and emotion that build and curve and accumulate, leaving the reader breathless, glad for the shifting of the earth that gave us these poems.

“With tenderness, wit and humor, Dust Bowl Venus explores the fragility of love, good health and the earth. Rooted not just in the places of the City of Modesto but also in the music, legends, and community of the Central Valley, these poems brilliantly reflect a struggle to find beauty in the contradictions of our contemporary lives.  Amazingly thoughtful and musical, these are poems we should all read.” —July Halebsky, author of Sky=Empty, Tree Line, and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)

“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. Marked with sass and grit and grace, Beratlis’s 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 of Chouteau’s Chalk and Tiller North

“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

In Alkali Sink, Stella Beratlis’s debut poetry collection, themes of family, loss, and the natural world weave together to create a universe of dichotomies at once dangerous and intimate, walking the line between the catastrophic and the sublime. Beratlis’s poems, rooted in her family’s Greek culture and the culture of California’s Central Valley, deftly maneuver between worlds as familiar and exotic as the mustard greens her immigrant mother gathers along an interstate highway. These poems transform ordinary acts—bird-watching, cooking, taking a road trip—into extraordinary ones. With its startling imagery and touches of wry humor, Alkali Sink brings us an exciting and original new poetic voice.

PRAISE FOR ALKALI SINK:

“In her poem ‘Vitreous Detachment,’ Stella Beratlis asks ‘How do I know?’ In Alkali Sink, a book that is at once sly and precise, honest and unique, Beratlis’s faith in both the interior and exterior worlds can be trusted enough to believe she can answer: with ‘the names of things and their pulpy centers.’ This is a poet in love with the dirt and the lamb, the armored car and the terrible sadness, with chaos and linear thought—everything that might ‘illuminate the several darknesses of the heart’ and the ‘multiplicity of the selves’ within a soul.” —Julia Levine, author of Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, winner of the Northern California Book Award, 2015.

“Alkali Sink reads like ‘a locomotive / speeding through a native West / changing the scale of my earth.” Central California races toward Greece, memory races toward reality, old age races toward youth, but the poems take their time, too, the way trains do, and I can peer into backyards and orchards and used-car lots as I go. At first I was here and now I am there, and the world I see is different because of how these poems moved me. Stella Beratlis has written a beautiful book.” —Camille T. Dungy, author of Smith Blue and Suck on the Marrow,  winner of an American Book Award, a California Book Award silver medal, and the Northern California book award.

“Stella Beratlis writes unforgettable poems that stir inside you long after you’ve finished reading them. Alkali Sink is simultaneously domestic and wild, urban and rural, full of surprises and wisdom. Your axis may shift after reading this remarkable book. Beratlis is a fierce talent whose beautiful mind encompasses the land, the open road, the kitchen window, and the heart's inconstancies. Her first full-length collection is one of the best debuts I have read.” —Lee Herrick, author of This Many Miles from Desire and Gardening Secrets of the Dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stella Beratlis grew up in a Greek-American family in Northern California. Her work has appeared in Quercus Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin, California Quarterly, and otherjournals, as well as in the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press, 2011). Beratlis is a librarian in Modesto, where she lives with her daughter. This is her first collection of poems.

Find ALKALI SINK by Stella Beratlis at Sixteen Rivers Press.

Hometown paper Modesto Bee did a sweet preview of my book launch reading on April 8, 2015. 

Michael Dennis reviewed Alkali Sink in Today's Book of Poetry, April 23, 2015. 

Read a review of Alkali Sink in PoetryMagazine.com, 2016. 

Dana Koster, magical human being and author of the recently-published collection Binary Stars gives Alkali Sink a shoutout in The Collagist, August 2015. Thanks, Dana! 

Jeff Jardine of The Modesto Bee did a write-up on the occasion of my being appointed Modesto's poet laureate for 2016-18. 

From Alkali Sink

All the Clothes She Has Ever Sewn

Look back at this chunky lace scene:

this holy toile that shades off, flaxen,

at the edges—

a mottled view through pinhole

aperture.

E-lab-o-rate.

Make elaborate;

trim and adorn skeletons and

fade them into translucence;

onion skin, papers to be worn.

Erase the bony edges

and celebrate the marrow,

the sorrow, Theotokos—

with convictions in organdy

and satin and a belief in metallic sin.

O she who gives birth to pleats,

to ribboned seams and silky sundries, to panels

and heart-sore tears in the lace, whose thread

bunches and who starts again

from the zigzag edge,

from every beginning to almost-finished 

loves: only she is worthy

of these little squares

scissored with gusto; 

only she makes the cut.