In Review: JUDAS GOAT by Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates’s debut collection feels like a still-flying dart thrown with skill and verve at a moving target. Released in 2023 by Tin House, the book made a splash sufficient to push Bates’s emergent name in the ‘rising-star’ direction, though she’d already placed work—largely individual poems subsequently folded into Judas Goat—in an impressive array of magazines, including The New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Bates—an Alabaman-turned-Seattlite—is exactly my age. Her instagram (which I sought out immediately) reflects the life of a breezy, melancholy aesthete; her page replete with photos of half-drunk cups of tea, candles burnt down to the wick, halved oysters, dappled light falling on various household objects, and Bates herself: dark, waifish, pretty, self-aware. Her recent snaps reveal a woman making the transition from private, intense artistic labor to what might be ostensibly called a literary career.

When I bought Judas Goat, I knew it had a reputation for combining the ever-potent themes of sexuality, identity, religion, and grief. It was odd to suddenly discover Bates: the slightly hair-raising phenomenon, perhaps, of encountering a more glamorous and poetically established version of myself; though our ventures and voices are distinct. Yet here is a woman who knows her body and her bible; a woman using the captivating, authoritative language of each to wrestle and lament and explore and interrogate and celebrate. I read Judas Goat thinking I might have to start saying ‘women like us’ instead of ‘women like me,’ – as in neither fish nor fowl, ‘ex’ nor capital ‘E’-vangelical.

The poems are earthy. Many are attached to Bates’s girlhood in a rustic southern farmhouse—they’re attached to livestock, attached to natural cycles, to seasons of the field, then deftly threaded back with a surgically precise needle through the changing seasons of the heart. Take “The Animals We Are” –

From the rotten spots in their shells,

mute in the grass where they’d fallen,

those pecans wanted out.

At eight years old, I gathered them

in my T-shirt—how women do this.

They kept a black piglet in the backyard then.

…the poem moves through a complex set of human emotions covertly, in plain, grassy language—the piglet is soon killed by farm dogs, which the speaker does not appear to mourn, observing only ‘Who could guess, at such an age, how ordinary//a dog’s teeth are?’ – this devastating restraint is characteristic of Bates on the whole. Her marvelous ‘less’ really is more—there is a mysterious, indelibly precise eloquence to everything she does not say. The titular poem must also receive its due in this regard, in particular its dazzling opening line “we, of our ends, are perhaps all this oblivious” – the poem relays in brief the life of a goat used to lead sheep to slaughter, ending on a firework line worthy of its opening: ‘I am too dying of what//I don’t know.’

Judas Goat takes big risks. It means to, and it wants to. This is evident throughout the collection, but perhaps most visible in the spine-tingling poem “Conversation With Mary,” a reflection on the Annunciation, which closes—

Did it hurt

Forever

Did you feel rewarded

I hallelujah I assented

How did it feel

Cold blood on the cock of God

Whose blood

My blood

The fact that it’s kind of a stunning line notwithstanding, ‘Cold blood on the cock of God’ will trigger accusations of scathing irreverence and incorrect theology in equal measure. According to the Judeo-Christian dogma Bates draws from for this poem, God the ‘Father’ is sexless—existing above and utterly beyond sex and gender, wholly ‘other.’ As such, allusions to God being a) sexed male, and b) rapey, will inevitably raise brows and alarm bells. We’re a long, long way from the Kansas of the biblical Magnificat. Bates takes the kind of risks people holding themselves every moment accountable to quote unquote orthodoxy simply can’t (or just wouldn’t) take. I’m grateful for the high-stakes game opened by what some will perceive as her offenses.

Judas Goat is equal parts clay, mud and blood, effectively inspirited by a voice that sometimes enters and sometimes departs from the body. In any case, something’s always hovering. I’ll leave you with the lines that entered and embedded in me, taken from “Effigy” –

In Alabama,

I faced the doors of a church,

and I thought, How to live

if this is who I am.

https://tinhouse.com/book/judas-goat-ebk/