Publishers Weekly
03/20/2023
Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths that arise from looking unflinchingly at recollections. The collection opens with “The Dog,” about a horrific death rescued from bleakness by the lines “How easily/ I could imagine a version of our lives/ in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.” These poems are laced with quotidian violence (“As if the only tool I owned for finding truth were a knife”) and suffering (“Forgive me, I am still learning how to know/ when a human will improve a scene”), as well as an abiding interest in creatures from dead white spiders to missing mothers. The majority of the poems are one-to-two pages, though the penultimate entry, “Mothers,” is six pages and feels like a breakthrough (“It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest”) into the final offering, “Anniversary,” in which the narrator wonders about a marriage: “What’s the name for the way we wake/ to sirens and each roll inward on the frame?” These yearning poems offer intriguing descriptions and insights. (Jan.)
The New York Times Book Review
"Elegant. . . . Bates moves fast, faces grim truths and draws hard lines."
Poets & Writers
"A sharp-eyed debut."
Write or Die Magazine
"The haunting and unexpected imagery in this collection makes you want to return to the poems time and time again."
The Dawn Review
"Ravenous and roaring. . . . Bates invites us to explore the depths of human relationships."
The Poetry Foundation
"The debut’s sequences on mourning, mothers, and marriage consider the ways in which encounters with nonhuman animals reveal the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior."
The Poetry Question
"One of America’s most unique voices. . . . Gabrielle Bates is one part rock star, one part bard, offering a debut that perfectly balances an unflinching, badass attitude with the practiced precision of an experienced student of poetics."
Autostraddle
"Stunning."
Debutiful
"The words leap off the page. Bates will be a lasting voice in the modern poetry landscape."
Vulture
"These poems are both generous and spare, full of unconventional portraits of longing—for safety, for love, for a motherhood one doesn’t truly desire. Bates is a wise, tender witness to the parts of ourselves we rarely expose."
The Rumpus
"Gabrielle Bates is a poet we’ll be reading for a very long time. Eyes forward, one hand always behind, bringing history in from the shadows, Bates offers in her poems lessons on how to move forward toward health and safety, and a thriving creative and emotional-spiritual interior, without letting go of who we are and where we came from, painful though it can be to bring ourselves, fully, into the light."
Garden & Gun
"Ravishing."
Tiana Clark
"Inside the slipperiness of language, Gabrielle Bates writes with a precision that is both lush and masterful. Her writing feels like a laser beam dancing under a waterfall, drenched with exquisite diction, ache, and desire. Violence and tenderness are throttled and exposed through human touch and terror, needling the symbolic intensities through the linguistic landscape of animals. Gorgeous questions loom and ricochet throughout Judas Goat, a book that has utterly wrecked my heart and left me in awe as I gasp at lines that wake me up to the wild world. Bates writes, ‘If I describe something, anything, long enough, / language will lead me back to wanting it.’ This type of yearning creates dazzling entry points inside poems probing and reaching for God, the South, marriage, friendship, mothers, and mentor poets we see as mothers, grieving, and so much longing, longing, longing bursting throughout this remarkable debut."
New England Review
"Arresting."
Book Riot
"Absolutely breathtaking."
Southern Review of Books
"Expansive, sure, and sharp."
Chicago Review of Books
"A sensitive and assured voice. . . . a noteworthy debut, and confirmation of Bates’s talent, heart and place in contemporary poetry."
Arkansas International
"Beautiful and devastating and real."
Washington Independent Review of Books
"What resonates. . . . is that desire to experience a fundamental love, even if it’s illusory."
A Best Poetry Collection of 2023 Electric Literature
"Dazzling…. Bates’s scintillating lyricism makes it a thrilling and unforgettable read."
Nicole Sealey
"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."
Shondaland
"A stunner of a debut. . . . Haunted, funny, and profound."
The Millions
"Hypnotic. . . . A deliciously (perhaps devilishly) original book."
Aria Aber
"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."
The Adroit Journal
"Lives on the blade-edge between forebears Carl Phillips and Brigit Pegeen Kelly—intimate and intoxicated and charged with violence; rooted in scripture, wilderness, home spaces. . . . and the mythic worlds we construct to sustain or drive ourselves."
Buzzfeed
"This collection bites, and soothes, and bites again—you won’t be able to quite catch your breath, and you won’t want to."
Alta Journal
"Haunting."
Library Journal
★ 04/01/2023
Refreshingly absent of any defining conceit or thematic throughline, Bates's debut collection is difficult to classify. The abstracted force of motherhood, the shadows and in-betweens of relationships that harm and haunt us, the slippery liminal space between the religious—all are revisited, but the larger spectrum is wonderfully fluid. There's often a rooted, corporeal quality to the writing, which dips its toes into Southern Gothic tradition—a swirl of scripture and violence and elemental living—as Bates paints identifiable portraits that are infused with both dark humor and simmering rage: "Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy, paints a letter there in red paint/ (R, and then another boy, I-O-T…)./ When the sun goes down over the ridge/ all the painted boys will make patriots." Sometimes Bates finds her way straight to the profound with economy, while elsewhere she relies less on caustic wit than pure linguistic beauty: "My mother's eyes were are also blue, but warmer,/ softened by greens—/ algal blooms/ stitching blankets of unswum pools." VERDICT Thrillingly bold, this collection is at once unique in approach, mischievous in its navigation of ideas, and lush yet controlled in its use of language, rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends.—Luke Gorham
