A Chicago Review of Books , The Millions, Debutiful, and Write or Die Magazine Best Book of January
An Autostraddle Most Anticipated Queer and Feminist Book of 2023
“Stellar. . . . with great humanity, grace, and precision.” —Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast
Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.
In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.
Gabrielle Bates’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. A writer, visual artist, and cohost of The Poet Salon podcast, Bates is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
Read an Excerpt
THE DOG
He didn’t want to tell me. He almost didn’t. It was luck much more than gut that made me ask. A beer opened an hour earlier than usual, the desire for conversation. There was no sense in me that he was in some sort of aftermath. He said, when I asked, I had a bad day, or, I had a weird day, I can’t remember. I saw a dog, he said. I was on the train. A man with a dog on a leash. The man ran and made it but the dog hesitated outside, and the doors closed— no, not on his neck—on the leash, trapping it. The man was inside, and the dog was outside on the platform. The button beside the door, ringed in light, blinked. The man was shouting now, hitting the button, all else silent, the befuddlement of dog pulled along, the pace slow until it wasn’t. The tunnel the train must pass through leaving the station is a perfectly calibrated, unforgiving fit. The dog had a color and a size I don’t know, so it comes to me as legion. Large. Small. Fur long, or short. White, or gray. But the man always looks the same. As I held him against me in our kitchen, the moment sharpened my eyes. How easily I could imagine a version of our lives in which he kept all his suffering secret from me. I saw the beer on the counter. I saw myself drink it. When we went to bed, I stared at the back of his head split between compassion and fury. My nails gently scratching up his arm, up and down, up and down, the blade without which the guillotine is nothing.
Contents: The Dog Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate Impermanent Intro to Theater Effigy Little Lamb The Animals We Are Dear Gretel Strawberries [Who Hasn’t Lain in a Yard with Boys] Dear Birmingham How Judas Died Conversation with Mary Time Lapse Sabbath The Mentor Eastern Washington Diptych The Greatest Show on Earth Saint of Ongoingness Self-Portrait as Provincial “Person” Comes from “Mask” When Her Second Horn, the Only Horn She Has Left, Ice / / Tithes The Bridge In the Dream in Which I Am a Widow And Even After All That, No Epiphany Dance Party at the Public Glasshouse Judas Goat The Lucky Ones Economic Mobility I Asked // I Got Illusion Garden Rosification Ownership Salmon This Is How Mud Is Made Again Mothers Anniversary Acknowledgments
