Virtual Craft Chat with Poet Gabrielle Bates

Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Gabrielle Bates to discuss her debut collection, Judas Goat. Gabrielle is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore.
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Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat, (Tin House, 2023), named by Vulture and the Chicago Review of Books as a must-read book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches occasionally through Hugo House, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Washington Rome Center.
About the Book
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.

[@mraaronreynolds]

I could listen to Gabrielle talk about poems forever

[@bbgodR]

Just read the book, yea that shit slaps!