Judas Goat

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.

Starred review from April 1, 2023

Refreshingly absent of any defining conceit or thematic throughline, Bates's debut collection is difficult to classify. The abstracted force of motherhood, the shadows and in-betweens of relationships that harm and haunt us, the slippery liminal space between the religious--all are revisited, but the larger spectrum is wonderfully fluid. There's often a rooted, corporeal quality to the writing, which dips its toes into Southern Gothic tradition--a swirl of scripture and violence and elemental living--as Bates paints identifiable portraits that are infused with both dark humor and simmering rage: "Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy, paints a letter there in red paint/ (R, and then another boy, I-O-T...)./ When the sun goes down over the ridge/ all the painted boys will make patriots." Sometimes Bates finds her way straight to the profound with economy, while elsewhere she relies less on caustic wit than pure linguistic beauty: "My mother's eyes were are also blue, but warmer, / softened by greens--/ algal blooms/ stitching blankets of unswum pools." VERDICT Thrillingly bold, this collection is at once unique in approach, mischievous in its navigation of ideas, and lush yet controlled in its use of language, rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends.--Luke Gorham

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