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.
The two-score poems within display a sensitive and assured voice and a candid exploration of human relationships and the self via mythologies, philosophies, and vulnerable narratives ... Bates wields brevity so sharp it leaves one breathless ... a noteworthy debut, and confirmation of Bates’s talent, heart and place in contemporary poetry.
The debut’s sequences on mourning, mothers, and marriage consider the ways in which encounters with nonhuman animals reveal the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior ... Across eulogies and love letters, Bates piercingly catalogs animals used as metaphor or foil, and wielded in a human economy.
Judas Goat is full of these images, of this language that makes you want to look away while pulling you closer ... Bates writes with such precision it’s almost ghastly ... a splash of cold water to the face. These poems wake you up only to make you tremble with their frankness.
