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Judas Goat

Poems

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"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 shape-shifting, 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 listeners close and whispers its unforgettable lines.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 20, 2023
      Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths that arise from looking unflinchingly at recollections. The collection opens with “The Dog,” about a horrific death rescued from bleakness by the lines “How easily/ I could imagine a version of our lives/ in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.” These poems are laced with quotidian violence (“As if the only tool I owned for finding truth were a knife”) and suffering (“Forgive me, I am still learning how to know/ when a human will improve a scene”), as well as an abiding interest in creatures from dead white spiders to missing mothers. The majority of the poems are one-to-two pages, though the penultimate entry, “Mothers,” is six pages and feels like a breakthrough (“It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest”) into the final offering, “Anniversary,” in which the narrator wonders about a marriage: “What’s the name for the way we wake/ to sirens and each roll inward on the frame?” These yearning poems offer intriguing descriptions and insights.

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  • English

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