Gabrielle Bates: On Assembling a Collection, the Intrigue of “the Judas Goat”, and Her Debut Poetry Book
Gabrielle Bates’s unique poetic voice has stuck with me ever since I finished reading her debut poetry collection, Judas Goat—and I suspect it will continue to for a long time. Throughout the book, which releases January 24 from Tin House, multiple dualities emerge: violence and gentleness, facades and familial, betrayal and love. The haunting and unexpected imagery in this collection makes you want to return to the poems time and time again.
I spoke with Bates via Google Docs about how Judas Goat came to be, the striking imagery throughout the collection, her influences, and upcoming projects.
First of all, congratulations on your upcoming debut! Can you share how the collection came to be and how you landed on the title/theme of the book?
Thank you, Erica! I really appreciate you spending time with the book.
Judas Goat came together very slowly and then all at once. Themes emerged organically as I chased the heat draft to draft. Only at the very end of the process, in the final years of working on the book, did I write poems specifically towards the collection to fill what felt like under-reckoned-with questions or characters. My interest in Judas as a figure in the Bible and various animals that have been named for him is one I’ve carried around for a long time. I remember feeling a kindredness when I read Natalie Diaz’s piece on the Harriet Blog in 2014, where she wrote about Judas horses and her own obsessions with betrayal—not a kindredness to the specifics, necessarily, but to an undercurrent there. I think I felt emboldened, reading that blog post, to follow my own Judas-related vexations and hauntings further.
For a long time I resisted having a “title poem” for my book. I worried that would put too much pressure on that one poem to encapsulate. But eventually I realized I was being silly and running away from the perfect title. Kary Wayson (author of the amazing book The Slip) encouraged me to embrace that title, and I’m so grateful for the nudge. Usually the title poem of a book is the longest poem in the book, but mine is short, a strange little stab.
Judas Goat kicks off with a gut-punch of a poem, “The Dog.” How did this poem come about and in what ways do you hope it leads readers through the rest of the collection?
At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference one summer, Vievee Francis charged those of us in her workshop to write a mean poem. She also charged me to risk clarity, to stop dancing around trying to impress people. It was a liberating and terrifying assignment, and I took it very seriously. I walked into the Little Theatre that afternoon, when no one else was there, and standing up in the back, in the dark, I wrote the first draft of “The Dog.” The whole experience was very electric. I never write good poems in response to prompts, but I could tell that poem was a breakthrough of some kind.
Eventually it became obvious that “The Dog” had to come first, as a kind of preface, because it’s too intense to put anywhere else. It announces, dramatically, some major themes, and it activates a sense of danger, an atmosphere of threat.
What is it about the proverbial “Judas goat” that intrigues you and makes it such a resounding image for you in your poems?
When I was about eight years old, my mom started living in an old, abandoned slaughterhouse in downtown Birmingham, and that building awakened my imagination to many things—the grisly machinations of meatpacking, animal ghosts, etc. By personality, growing up, I was eager to please, and my ultimate goal throughout my entire childhood and adolescence was to be holy and righteous by certain Christian standards, but I found it more and more difficult to trust those in positions of spiritual authority over me, and I became increasingly haunted by obedience as a concept. All of this and more alchemized into a fascination with the Judas goat.
A few references are made to specific places throughout the collection (Birmingham, East Washington) — in what ways have these places shaped who you are as a poet and person?
Being in one place helps me see the other place. The imagination thrives on distance.
I love the cover art for this book. Can you share how it came to be and why it really fits with the style of the book overall?
Tin House designer Beth Steidle created that image! I can’t take any credit for it. I’d hoped for a cover that would grab attention and make people want to stare at it a while, something unnerving and feminine, and this one definitely does all those things. The optical illusion aspect feels resonant, when it comes to the book, because imagery—what it can and can’t convey, how it tells the truth and how it lies—is a major obsession of mine.
Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?
Today, maybe because it’s a Sunday and I’m back in Birmingham, I might say my favorite poem in the collection is “Sabbath.” It’s about a particular kind of longing in regards to faith. Feels difficult to excerpt, but here is a sentence: “I’ve missed / feeding all my thoughts through that revolving blade / so thin it could only be felt.”
What inspires you to write? Who are some of your biggest literary influences?
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Vievee Francis, Linda Gregg, and Marilynne Robinson come immediately to mind as influences, but I’m influenced by everyone I read. What compels me to write is, ultimately, mysterious. Reading and writing feel like ghosts of the same process.
How does your work with The Poet Salon impact and inform your work as a poet?
Being in conversation with other poets and close-reading poems together renews my excitement about the possibilities of language. Luther Hughes, Dujie Tahat, and our guests on The Poet Salon invite me to read more attentively, get more curious about what I’m curious about, and challenge my assumptions about how literature can live on the page and in the air.
Do you have any other projects on the horizon?
I’m working on an ongoing series of epistolary experiments (an excerpt of the one I did with Jennifer S. Cheng is available to read on the Poetry Foundation website; it’s called “So We Must Meet Apart”). And I’m also perpetually working on a novel. I don’t know if either of these projects will ever become books, but I am actively working on them. I also have a long poem in progress that’s narrated from a kind of afterlife, loosely ekphrastic, which I started last summer, when I was teaching in Rome.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House), named by Vulture and the Chicago Review of Books as a "must-read" book of 2023. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, Bates’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, and the Best American Experimental Writing anthology. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she helps out at Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. You can find her online at www.gabriellebat.es, on Twitter (@GabrielleBates), or IG (@gabrielle_bates_).
About the Interviewer
Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Serotonin, FERAL, Gnashing Teeth, Selcouth Station, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020), her debut poetry chapbook. She volunteers for Button Poetry and Mad Poets Society. Follow her on Instagram @poetry_erica and on Twitter @erica_abbott and visit her website here.
