abrielle Bates ’13 is a rising figure in the world of poetry. With Bates’ debut collection, “Judas Goat,” receiving critical acclaim, her place as a prominent voice in modern poetry is solidified. Bates shares excerpts from what the Library Journal calls a “thrillingly bold” book, containing 40 poems that “plumbs the depths of intimate relationships and conjures encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force,” published by Tin House.
“Judas Goat” was featured as a New York Times “The Shortlist” pick, a Chicago Review of Books “Must-Read” and was the “Most-Anticipated Book of Winter” from Vulture.
Bates shares the inspiration behind the book and excerpts from “Judas Goat”:
early love. I am also told
it works out, sometimes,
for saplings can be braided like hair.
We will bend and grow together
while the centuried oaks at Toomer’s Corner
hollow, and the college tree poisoner
brags on the radio. Your ring on my finger,
a single green stone, is alive
in the night, in the blue
glow of numbers above the stove…
to the Spanish statue of the falling angel,
its snake of stone wrapped twice around one leg’s ankle
and coiled around the thigh of the other, stone jaw
unhinged and reaching for the humanesque hand.
We lived, remember? Briefly, near it. One wing arcs up in the sky
erecting an honest steeple, one that points not straight,
but upward and curving. As faith goes.
Back to earth…
An insect traversing the curve.
Dusky pearls strung on a wire in my hair
wound low in a bow at the cerebellum,
the brain’s wing-shaped center for balance.
It’s April. There’s no balance here.
Not in the arch twisted from an ice storm-
struck tree, the bluegrass grabbing my lace.
Scent of smoked meats mingling with the sugar-sweet
confections just burst on the apples’ limbs.
Hands. Fingers. Ring of rough steel he bought
for $35, whose ends don’t fuse but overlap
like an overbite—the symbolism isn’t
lost on a woman like me:
There is a beginning and an end, April,
and one of us will go before the other…
I am always trying to come to a new understanding of the risks and rewards of love, and I try to write towards what haunts me, as a way of transforming fear into something else.
