Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
I tried to write a sentence that would sum up what this collection is about—loss, or love, or growing up as a girl in the South—but all of those words felt reductive, because Judas Goat is a living thing. Its unifying force: Gabrielle Bates’s incredibly observant voice and haunting imagery, which can turn a poem about a college football game day into something absolutely transcendent.
As someone who grew up in Mississippi, I appreciate the way that the South is rendered in this collection. There are so many different versions of the South, and the one that often makes it into our collective consciousness isn’t one that ever felt real to me. But this collection feels real, thanks to Bates’s astute observations.
There is sharpness at work in Bates’s handling of the psyche as well. Here’s a quote from the poem “The Mentor” that will be with me for a while:
You ask when I stopped shouting everything
and started keeping language close to my mouth as if I were reading to a match that had to last my life.
Well it was not that day. That was much later, after the trees had all been cleared and the earth
leveled. When I stopped begging to be believed and started telling the truth, no man was there.
For me, this is a perfect description of what the violence of patriarchy and the South does to women—to their bodies and their minds. I felt these lines in my bones, as I did most of this collection. Gabrielle Bates takes the material around her and fashions it into something beautiful and devastating and real, and this review can’t come close to doing her collection justice.
—Review by Sarah Barch
