JUDAS GOAT

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.

Tin House

—Review by Sarah Barch

DOT

Dot by Ron padgett

Celebrated poet Ron Padgett’s latest collection Dot is a refreshing read for its wisdom and levity, or perhaps for the wisdom in its levity. In his notes on the title, Padgett asks the question, “How short can a title be and still be effective?” and explains how he was drawn to the word “dot” not only for its shortness, but also for its resonance. It’s those ideas of resonance and brevity that carry this collection. Padgett’s poems are wise, and heavy, and about the nature of reality and existence, of loss and love and growing old. But they are also short, and full of laughter. They are made from levity in the way that a comic book is made from hundreds of dots, and the way that our lives are the sum of so many small moments. 

I was struck by how enjoyable of a read this collection was, and most of all, how it came across as effortless, never trying too hard (what the actual craft process is like, however, for creating poems that manage to come across as effortless, is beyond me). In his longer poems, Padgett’s loose associations feel both delightfully surprising and completely natural; in the prose poem “Both of Me,” for instance, how could I have anticipated that the humorous linguistic observations that begin the poem would transition to the subject of a box of matches, then to a portrait of Allen Ginsberg painted by Alex Katz? And yet I find myself trusting these turns without question. 

This feels like a byproduct of Padgett’s steady, confident style. He is not proving anything to you. He does not have to. While reading his collection I felt this in my bones, and what a calming feeling this was to have as a reader. And so I’ll leave you with a short little poem that I love, called “Bubble,” so that you can see what I mean, too:

It’s a very great pleasure

to walk with you in November,

our bodies sleepy in the clarity

falling across the city

and to feel a kiss alive

from a height of five feet two

and new shadows on my shirt

rising and falling as I live

and breathe with you.

Coffee House Press

—Review by Sarah Barch