Finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award
An NPR Best Book of 2023
"Stellar. . . . with great humanity, grace, and precision." -Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast
Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.
In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines. Rich with myth, scripture and childhood memory, these poems were impossible to turn away from.-NPR, A Best Book of 2023
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.-Vulture
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 Foundation
A sharp-eyed debut.-Poets & Writers
Elegant. . . . Bates moves fast, faces grim truths and draws hard lines.-The New York Times Book Review
Ravishing.-Garden & Gun Magazine
A stunner of a debut. . . . Haunted, funny, and profound.-Shondaland
Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths. . . . These yearning poems offer intriguing descriptions and insights.-Publishers Weekly
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.-The Rumpus
Hypnotic. . . . A deliciously (perhaps devilishly) original book.-The Millions
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.-The Adroit Journal
Beautiful and devastating and real.-Arkansas International
A sensitive and assured voice. . . . a noteworthy debut, and confirmation of Bates's talent, heart and place in contemporary poetry.-Chicago Review of Books
Expansive, sure, and sharp.-Southern Review of Books
Dazzling…. Bates's scintillating lyricism makes it a thrilling and unforgettable read.-Electric Literature, A Best Poetry Collection of 2023
Thrillingly bold. . . . unique in approach, mischievous in its navigation of ideas, and lush yet controlled in its use of language.-Library Journal
This collection bites, and soothes, and bites again-you won't be able to quite catch your breath, and you won't want to.-Buzzfeed
The words leap off the page. Bates will be a lasting voice in the modern poetry landscape.-Debutiful
Stunning.-Autostraddle
Haunting.-Alta Journal
Absolutely breathtaking.-Book Riot
What resonates. . . . is that desire to experience a fundamental love, even if it's illusory.-Washington Independent Review of
