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PRAISE FOR JUDAS GOAT

"Thrillingly bold... unique... rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends." —Library Journal, starred review

“Rich with myth, scripture and childhood memory, these poems were impossible to turn away from.” —NPR, Best Book of 2023

“Dazzling…. Bates’s scintillating lyricism makes it a thrilling and unforgettable read.” —Electric Literature, Top Poetry Book of 2023

“Stunning… nearly impossible to put down…” —Autostraddle

"Elegant... dazzling... faces grim truths and draws hard lines" —New York Times Book Review, Critics Pick

“Bates is a wise, tender witness to the parts of ourselves we rarely expose.” —Vulture

"Gripping" —The Seattle Times

“A sharp-eyed debut" —Poets & Writers

"A stunner. . . . Haunted, funny, and profound." —Shondaland

"...so sharp it leaves one breathless" —Chicago Review of Books

"A living thing... beautiful and devastating and real" —The Arkansas International

"The words leap off the page. Bates will be a lasting voice in the modern poetry landscape.” —Debutiful

“…reveals the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior.” —Poetry Foundation

"Haunting" —Alta 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

"[C]omplex and careful... attests to the plain fact of suffering without vying for some stale assertion of resilience." —The Sewanee Review

"Exceeds its promise... beautifully wrought... I'm not saying Bates is leading us to slaughter, but I'd follow her even if she were" —Mid-American Review

"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

"[filled] with intense imagery and surprising truths" —Publishers Weekly

"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

"Expansive, sure, and sharp." —Southern Review of Books

“Outstanding... poems that arrive at the level of the senses already in motion, like the back of an animal velvet-warm and writhing beneath the hand.” —Powell’s City of Books

"Remarkable... one of America’s most unique voices." —The Poetry Question

"Arresting" —New England Review

"I’ve written elsewhere that the border between the sacred and the profane is porous, but Bates’s debut makes me wonder if such a border even exists. [O]riginal... hypnotic" —The Millions

“This poetry collection feels like actual augury… Gabrielle Bates is absolutely seeing through the veil and apprehending some kind of cosmic realness, even when all these poems are absolutely grounded in the body, in the blood and bruises and dirt and dead things. The writing itself is pure and pruned and overflowing with images that stick in your head… I cried more than once… It’s just bangers all the way down.” —Little Oracles

"Brutal and beautiful" —Cunning Folk

"With its exploration of otherness, Judas Goat is dangerous in its own, best ways." —Sage Cigarettes Magazine

"What resonates. . .  is that desire to experience a fundamental love, even if it’s illusory." —Washington Independent Review of Books

"I will take Judas Goat with me wherever I go now..." —F(r)iction

"Ravishing... refuses to flinch, or cease longing" —Garden & Gun

Now available in audiobook !

“Gabrielle Bates announces herself as a poet of compassion, precision, and heartbreak in all its myriad ways—in Judas Goat, the poet studies and upends stories of suffering in both human and animal worlds. Radiating with the curiosity and wonder of a medieval painter, the poet’s refreshing voice creates a glistening world of religious, mythic, pagan, and modern images which interrogate the cruelties in our most intimate relationships: lovers, parents, landscapes, and gods. In poems that are both sharp and tender, she writes of effigies and little lambs, of chisels in the hands of mentors, of early marriages, of subway stations, of white ash and the ‘cold blood on the cock of god.’ And yet through all the layers of large and little violences emerges a speaker who believes in love, a voice that yearns for the mysterious otherwhere: ‘I am too dying/ of what I don’t know.’ I was stunned by this magnificent debut—here is the voice of a poet I will be reading again and again.”

—Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

READING & LISTENING