by Nicole Yurcaba
Gabrielle Bates’ debut collection Judas Goat is filled with allusions to history, society, geography, and religion. It’s a quietly enticing collection, opening with the poem “The Dog,” with its unforgettable lines “The tunnel the train must pass through leaving the station / is a perfectly calibrated, unforgiving fit.” “The Dog,” and those two lines, are a perfect summation of the speaker’s experience in the American South, a place portrayed as both physical home and emotional prison throughout Judas Goat.
Nonetheless, the collection poses another challenging question: How does one escape those whose influence so strongly, and negatively, impacts their life? While “Impermanent” poses this question, it doesn’t fully answer it, and that’s the beautiful part of this particular poem. Couplets combine with simplistic language and first-person point-of-view. The poem’s grip forms and tightens because of Yoda-esque structural inversions: “If your name will never not be / gravel in my mouth, I wonder.” The poem also offers a different salvation of sorts–that of literature–as the speaker asserts associating guilt with “wanting anything” except “books” because “good books were safe.” Of course, readers won’t miss the speaker’s slow stab at the South’s notorious reputation as the Bible Belt: “and the Good Book best of all // to be caught eyeing, / though dangerous in its own ways.” It’s an observation, a challenge, and the speaker’s own reckoning with an environment threatening to censor the speaker’s development.
With its exploration of otherness, Judas Goat is dangerous in its own, best ways. This exploration primarily happens when the speaker frequently invokes Judas, the infamous disciple who betrayed Christ to the Sanhedrin. “How Judas Died” reads like an empathetic love song to the often scorned betrayer. The poem relies on words like “dark” and “black” to establish the otherness. The speaker asserts, “If Judas coughs up a coin into my hand, // let it be night, the birds, hungry.” Nighttime becomes a playing field for evil and otherness, echoing puritanical ideologies which established nighttime as a place where evil and the devil thrived.
And what about relational otherness? What if a person cannot quite follow traditional expectations for forming and maintaining a relationship? “The Greatest Show on Earth” captures the self-awareness one possesses when they realize they cannot function in, or maintain, a traditional relationship. The poem’s skewed form captures the relationship’s undoing. A distinctive stanza centers the poem:
We spread enough distance between us
to where no one would suspect
we belonged to each other.
The stretched, spreading lines mimic the physical, geographic, and emotional distance between the speaker and the partner. The speaker’s direct language conveys an acceptance, a resolve–at least on the speaker’s part.
“Self-Portrait as Provincial” relies on the same line structures and formatting as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” It also echoes the speaker’s otherness in regards to relationships, opening with the honestly blunt line, “We were getting too close, so I flew solo.” Sheep and rams play a prominent role in the poem. The poem carefully balances human existence with the natural world, in a unique way. The speaker focuses on a ram’s act of bashing its head. In nature, rams bash their heads to establish dominance and improve their physical condition for the breeding season. Thus, in the poem, the ram’s actions act as a metaphor for the speaker’s flight response in relationships. The speaker weeps, “for I have become the winter I wanted.” This haunting line concludes the poem, and it also acts as an omen for poems like “In the Dream In Which I Am a Widow.”
“In the Dream In Which I Am a Widow” is an evocative poem rife with plaintive language. The poem’s opening lines are clinchers: “I have carried a portion of your ashes overseas / to the Spanish statue of the falling angel.” As the poem unfolds, its lines ebb forward, twisting and enjambing so that lines fold one onto the other:
Back to earth. I’ve scattered part of what you were
from the mouth of my black jacket sleeve into the field across,
watched over by tall and leaning trees, the field
cold as ice and glowing, your socks full of grass.
This folding reminds readers about grief’s many layers, how each individual must process death and grief in their own ways, with their own rituals, in their own time. Nonetheless, the poem carries another message: What truths do individuals learn about those who have died, and how do individuals process those truths when they contradict the individuals’ perceptions of the deceased?
Judas Goat is a tally of the many ways people and places inextricably embed themselves in one’s being and existence. The speaker’s wanderings through emotional wildernesses are part self-exploration, part self-discovery, and part exorcism. Confessional and enlightening, Bates’ verses take readers on a harrowing journey emotionally and linguistically. Read more about Judas Goat at Southern Review of Books.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian (Hutsul/Lemko) American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.
