Staff Pick
I’ve been looking forward to a full collection from Gabrielle Bates ever since reading her poem ‘The Dog’ (published a few years ago in The Offing) whose stoic oscillations between brutality and tenderness left me quietly awed and curious for more. Now 'The Dog' serves as the opening poem to her outstanding debut Judas Goat, a rightful overture to a book of granular intensity and wrestling across its weighty core elements: the entanglements of violence and eros; the torsions of marriage and mothering; the sustenance of queer art-making and friendship; and the psychic residue of a childhood spent in the Deep South. Possessing a deft (sometimes gut-wrenching) intuition for the literary image, Judas Goat signals a vibrant year ahead for debut collections with poems that arrive at the level of the senses already in motion, like the back of an animal velvet-warm and writhing beneath the hand. Recommended By Alexa W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Gabrielle Bates's spellbinding debut poetry collection Judas Goat plumbs the frightening and sacred depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Its harrowing existence becomes the perfect symbol for this electric collection of thirty-nine poems, which wrestles with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love. In wondrous and visceral moves, the poems encounter Abrahamic scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and the boundaries of motherhood. They question what it means to love another person; how to exorcize childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts the poems, and even as the speaker leaves to another state, then other countries, the South always draws her back home.
In confession, in illumination, Gabrielle Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.
Review
"Gabrielle Bates announces herself as a poet of compassion, precision, and heartbreak in all its myriad ways-in Judas Goat, the poet studies and upends stories of suffering in both human and animal worlds. Radiating with the curiosity and wonder of a medieval painter, the poet's refreshing voice creates a glistening world of religious, mythic, pagan, and modern images which interrogate the cruelties in our most intimate relationships: lovers, parents, landscapes, and gods. In poems that are both sharp and tender, she writes of effigies and little lambs, of chisels in the hands of mentors, of early marriages, of subway stations, of white ash and the 'cold blood on the cock of god.' And yet through all the layers of large and little violences emerges a speaker who believes in love, a voice that yearns for the mysterious otherwhere: 'I am too dying/ of what I don't know.' I was stunned by this magnificent debut-here is the voice of a poet I will be reading again and again." Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage
Review
"I was once so terrified of my own contentment / I bit my shoulder / and drew blood, ' confesses a speaker in Gabrielle Bates' stellar debut, Judas Goat, which thinks through our luck and lot with great humanity, grace, and precision. In disbelief, you'll want to pinch yourself while reading...no need. Believe me, Judas Goat is just that good." Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast
About the Author
Gabrielle Bates is a writer, visual artist, and co-host of The Poet Salon podcast. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and other publications. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Gabrielle lives in Seattle, Washington.