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

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ BY MORGAN TALTY

Sometimes it’s not strangers who plague us, but rather those we know best. In the twelve linked stories of Morgan Talty’s blistering and bleak debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, curses come from family and friends, in the form of the trauma that’s passed down through generations, and the people to whom we are beholden.

Early in the second story, “In a Jar,” the collection’s protagonist, David, finds a jar of teeth hidden behind the front steps of his new home. David brings the jar to his mother, who shows it to a medicine man, Frick. Frick deduces that the jar is a curse, the significance of which hangs over the rest of the tales. 

At home in the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation, David is shackled with poverty, addiction, and abuse—shared, intergenerational curses all. Likewise, the secondary characters who criss-cross through the collection both grapple with and impose binds of their own: Frick is not only a nearby medicine man, but also David’s mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend; David’s friend Fellis requires frequent trips to the methadone clinic, with rides from David; and David’s older sister, Paige, arrives back at home one day, unannounced and pregnant.

Nature, too, is often a visceral reflection of the pressures David faces. In “Get Me Some Medicine,” a card game leads to useless violence and a quixotic quest to catch porcupines. In “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars,” Fellis and David drive over a horde of the titular larvae, exploding them with the sound of “popping corn.” The dead insects, described by Talty in his dynamic, impish prose as smelling “of bait, of something chewed up and spit out or even shit out,” sicken the two friends, twisting this symbol of rebirth toward a potent reminder of all that keeps them tethered to the reservation.

That’s not to say that the collection is entirely grim. Talty has a knack for generating hilarious, surreal situations that reinforce the book’s themes of captivity and obligation. In the first story, “Burn,” David returns from a failed quest to buy weed and runs into a panicked Fellis, whose hair has frozen to the ground during a drunken roadside nap. David eventually cuts his friend’s hair with a pocketknife, freeing him from the ice, and wonders whether the braid can be traded for money.

No, he ultimately decides. Instead, Fellis suggests they burn the hair. “Don’t want spirits after us,” he says. Perhaps, in this fiery, wonderful collection, some tethers can be broken.

Tin House

—Review by Eden Shulman

Read “In a Stray Field of Caterpillars” in ArkInt Issue 12!

THE YEAR OF THE HORSES

THE YEAR OF THE HORSES BY COURTNEY MAUM

When someone who rides horses is asked about their connection to the four-legged, half-ton creatures who make the pastime possible, answers tend to fall in one of two categories: the simple, wherein the horse’s presence is something so everyday, so necessary, that you might as well inquire about the person’s connection with breathing; and the fiendishly complicated, wherein the horse is bound inextricably with the horse-person, yes, but in such a manner that the person can’t help but poke at the places where they’re tied together, looking for answers to explain how they got there. In her memoir The Year of the Horses, Courtney Maum shows herself to be in the latter camp, which is a stroke of luck for the reading public, since the introspection and self-knowledge present on every page of the book are as stunning as the prose itself. 

Maum’s book is an exploration—not only of the way that horseback riding helped her return to herself and her family after a period of prolonged depression, but also of the ways that her own nature does and does not mesh with that of the horse, and the places in her life where this is particularly visible. This is a deeply affecting memoir that leaves no proverbial stone unturned—marriage, motherhood, politics, the female body—but always returns to the horse in the end, and for good reason. “I don’t care where you stand on horses,” she says toward the end of the narrative, “if you set out to debunk the hold they have on people, take away their power, prove that they aren’t as enchanting as they seem to be, you will lose, because they are that powerful, they are that moving, they have something that there aren’t words to explain.” Maybe, as Maum says, the world doesn’t contain quite the right words to describe the human connection with horses. But The Year of the Horses gets as close as can be, with an under-the-skin magic reminiscent of the animals themselves. 

Tin House.

—Review by Lily Buday