Judas goat

Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths that arise from looking unflinchingly at recollections. The collection opens with "The Dog," about a horrific death rescued from bleakness by the lines "How easily/ I could imagine a version of our lives/ in which he kept all his suffering secret from me." These poems are laced with quotidian violence ("As if the only tool I owned for finding truth were a knife") and suffering ("Forgive me, I am still learning how to know/ when a human will improve a scene"), as well as an abiding interest in creatures from dead white spiders to missing mothers. The majority of the poems are one-to-two pages, though the penultimate entry, "Mothers," is six pages and feels like a breakthrough ("It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest") into the final offering, "Anniversary," in which the narrator wonders about a marriage: "What's the name for the way we wake/ to sirens and each roll inward on the frame?" These yearning poems offer intriguing descriptions and insights. (Jan.)

Refreshingly absent of any defining conceit or thematic throughline, Bates's debut collection is difficult to classify. The abstracted force of motherhood, the shadows and in-betweens of relationships that harm and haunt us, the slippery liminal space between the religious--all are revisited, but the larger spectrum is wonderfully fluid. There's often a rooted, corporeal quality to the writing, which dips its toes into Southern Gothic tradition--a swirl of scripture and violence and elemental living--as Bates paints identifiable portraits that are infused with both dark humor and simmering rage: "Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy, paints a letter there in red paint/ (R, and then another boy, I-O-T…)./ When the sun goes down over the ridge/ all the painted boys will make patriots." Sometimes Bates finds her way straight to the profound with economy, while elsewhere she relies less on caustic wit than pure linguistic beauty: "My mother's eyes were are also blue, but warmer,/ softened by greens--/ algal blooms/ stitching blankets of unswum pools." VERDICT Thrillingly bold, this collection is at once unique in approach, mischievous in its navigation of ideas, and lush yet controlled in its use of language, rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends.--Luke Gorham

THE DOG He didn't want to tell me. He almost didn't. It was luck much more than gut that made me ask. A beer opened an hour earlier than usual, the desire for conversation. There was no sense in me that he was in some sort of aftermath. He said, when I asked, I had a bad day, or, I had a weird day, I can't remember. I saw a dog, he said. I was on the train. A man with a dog on a leash. The man ran and made it but the dog hesitated outside, and the doors closed-- no, not on his neck--on the leash, trapping it. The man was inside, and the dog was outside on the platform. The button beside the door, ringed in light, blinked. The man was shouting now, hitting the button, all else silent, the befuddlement of dog pulled along, the pace slow until it wasn't. The tunnel the train must pass through leaving the station is a perfectly calibrated, unforgiving fit. The dog had a color and a size I don't know, so it comes to me as legion. Large. Small. Fur long, or short. White, or gray. But the man always looks the same. As I held him against me in our kitchen, the moment sharpened my eyes. How easily I could imagine a version of our lives in which he kept all his suffering secret from me. I saw the beer on the counter. I saw myself drink it. When we went to bed, I stared at the back of his head split between compassion and fury. My nails gently scratching up his arm, up and down, up and down, the blade without which the guillotine is nothing. Excerpted from Judas Goat: Poems by Gabrielle Bates All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.