poetic conversations: For the (complex) Image: A Review of Gabrielle Bates’ Judas Goat
My grandfather threaded two sharp hooks into the knees of the doe he’d shot earlier, hanging it upside down while an uncle took a knife and sawed into the thick flesh of the deer’s stomach. As he pulled the blade down, the intestines burst out and hung there, dark red and steaming with heat in the Alabama November cold. First kill of the season — shoulda been a buck, but the meat’ll do, Papa muttered. Years later, he’d shoot himself in the basement of the house 30 feet away, maybe with the same gun he’d killed the doe. He’d leave me his other guns to collect dust in the closet, and his old farm truck that I’d ride till it caught fire in the driveway in the middle of the night. My dad, sister, and I: standing in our pajamas in the backyard, watching the flames consume the cab, hearing the metal crack.
There’s a brutality that permeates the landscape of the American South — a sort of surrealism that comes from the hyperrealistic absurdity of everyday life. An “Old South” fraternity party where white college students don poofed-up dresses and overalls on slave plantation grounds. A giant wooden sign on the side of a highway depicting a cartoonish demon (pitchfork and all) that reads “GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU.” A new megachurch built across the street from a row of houses fallen into disarray. The grotesque and intense imagery in the Southern Gothic and other literature from the American South was born from this enduring landscape. I’ve always believed there’s a reason writers from the deep South are pulled toward the difficulty of a complex image.
Alabamian poet Gabrielle Bates is one such writer. Her debut poetry collection, Judas Goat, is built around a series of complex images. The influence of Southern Gothic writing on Bates’s collection is evident — at one point while taking notes for this review, I had a section titled “Poems in which the speaker is gored by a goat.” Using the image as a vehicle, Judas Goat gives an unsparing look at a Southern upbringing, religious trauma, difficult family dynamics — but also the beauty in nature, the magic of finding understanding in a beloved, and the bittersweetness of healing / looking back at what’s been lost.
It takes a lot of guts to dedicate a book “For the Image.” Bates earns the epigraph in Judas Goat’s first poem, “The Dog.” The poem recounts an interaction between the speaker and her beloved. After a long day apart, the beloved reveals a horrendous event that he’d witnessed earlier — a dog’s leash getting stuck in the door of a train. The beloved says of the dog’s owner,
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.
Bates’s speaker holds her beloved in the kitchen as they contemplate this horrible moment. As a reader, it’s impossible to untie the franticness of the dog owner unable to reach his pet from the closeness of these two lovers embracing. There’s a distance in this intimacy. Bates’s images do this — they reveal nuance and complication. The resulting emotional truths are complex, built around images that are not afraid to be in contrast with each other as in “The Dog.” That complexity lends itself to the poet’s recounting of a Southern upbringing.
More often than not, when I tell someone I grew up in Alabama, their response is some combination of a wince, an “oof,” and a look that says I’m Sorry. This response is understandable given the history of the state, as well as the continued governmental and societal oppression. It’s easy for me to just stop there, to accept the wince, the I’m Sorry. What’s more difficult is telling the truth about the complexity of growing up in the South. For example, I’ve always found it hard to write about the experience of growing up queer in Alabama. It’s easy to recount the slurs, the violence, the religious trauma; this is a narrative people are comfortable with. What’s more difficult is being honest about the love, warmth, and safety I’ve felt (and still feel) from friends and family who I know believe there’s a hell and I’m qualified to go there. It’s difficult to write into these complicated Southern dynamics, but it’s this type of nuance for which Bates’s images reach.
The poem “Strawberries” recounts a classic Alabama Friday: preparing for a high school football game. Of a cheerleader performing at the game, Bates writes of her “cervix slapping the fifty-yard line / like a fried egg flipped down on a griddle to burn.” The violence here is not just how visceral the image is, but how mundane. The most common breakfast food, you might flip an egg over every morning; likewise, Friday night after Friday night, somewhere in the South a cheerleader will do a split in front of bleachers filled with cheering dads and leering high school boys. Later in the poem, Bates writes, “In the parking lot, Are you asleep / says the boy who is not my boyfriend, / running his fingers along the band of my underwear.” It would be valid and justified after this disturbing image to leave the poem on the doorstep of the men who foster this predatory culture. Instead, the speaker moves inward: she admits “I feel ashamed / for all the moments / I’ve been kind / knowing kindness is all it would take.” It’s hard to determine how much of this shame the speaker is taking responsibility for, and maybe that’s the point — that shame obscures responsibility for the person experiencing it, and Bates’s choice not to explain the connection between her image and the speaker’s feeling of responsibility illustrates that blurring.
One of my favorite examples of Bates’s unsparing nuance is the poem “Sabbath.” The poem begins with the speaker comparing a cluster of mushrooms covered with dirt to “Catholics bearing ash.” The speaker then veers into revelation. She admits she misses the clear, interpretive worldview that Christianity offers — “that revolving blade / so thin it could only be felt.” Having been raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, I understand how difficult it is to grow up and shed those beliefs. Although I carry a lot of pain from that period of my life, there are times I miss the simplicity and comfort of knowing there’s something greater directing things. The complexity in Bates’s image is this: the speaker is lamenting the loss of her old worldview, but remnants of it will always remain. Envisioning the mushrooms as ash-bearing Catholics in the first place shows the lingering lens of belief. I often envy people who never really believed, who never had the much-emphasized “personal relationship” with Jesus. They never experienced the beauty of having something so fully to believe in, so they don’t feel its loss. When I miss that clarity, it doesn’t matter to me if it was true or not. Or as Bates says, “I lacked / but with aim.”
Many of the most compelling poems in Judas Goat circle around interpersonal relationships. The dual-connected poems “Ice/” and “/Tithes” deftly thread the needle through the tense cloth of a daughter-father relationship. The poem starts, “In pockets / of Alabama / it snows / in Spring.” The poem then shifts back and forth between vignettes of two images: a doe destroying a cherry tree the father planted on the night of his daughter’s wedding, and an ice skater alone on a frozen pond. Amidst the shifting imagery, the speaker asks, “What could be / less permanent / than being only / a daughter to men.” The sentence takes on a double meaning. Bates writes of “being only a daughter to men” in the way society often determines a woman’s worth only in relationship to a man — for example, the Southern idea of a man “giving his daughter away” at her wedding. In the context of the book, though, there’s also a more literal sense: having only a father as a parent. As Bates writes later in the poem “Salmon,” “I am my father’s only child, and he is my mother.” The line between the violence in the first type of ownership, and the intimacy in the second, is thin. All of the imagery in “Ice/” and “/Tithes” points to this line’s fragility. Snow spring melts quickly. What the father plants, and thinks he owns, is torn apart by forces beyond his control. The ice skater carves their skates into the ice, the only thing keeping them from drowning.
As with her depiction of other relationships, Bates’s love poems in Judas Goat are anything but simple. They often address the internal conflict that people seldom write about when they write about love. What does it mean to find someone who loves and accepts you fully, but to have trouble accepting that love? “If your name will ever not be / gravel in my mouth, I wonder” begins a poem that ends with the speaker “crawling beneath” the rock of her beloved to replenish her venom. I think of the romantic cliché “you are my rock” and how that image is repurposed here as an object that both impedes and allows intimacy. “The Lucky Ones” centers around the complications of marrying an early love. It’s common practice in the South to become engaged while still in college, where this poem takes place, and get married soon after graduation. Although the speaker hopes she and her beloved can bend and grow together “how saplings can be braided like hair” the mention of a tree poisoner in the very next lines shows a fear of failure. The last poem in the collection, “Anniversary,” begins on the speaker’s wedding day and moves to the first anniversary of it. Near the beginning of the poem, Bates writes of “the brain’s wing-shaped center for balance” and spends the rest of the poem addressing that idea. What does balance look like in a lifelong partnership? The answer is in the beloved’s ring, “Whose ends don’t fuse but overlap” at the beginning of the poem. But at the end, the speaker admits: “when I say he hammered the ring to make it fit, / I mean the ring fits.”
That there’s no balance without imbalance, no truth without complication, is not only a brilliant insight into relationships but also a sort of thesis for Judas Goat as a whole. While most of my time in this review was spent on the Southern influence in Bates’s work, anyone who picks up this poetry collection will learn a lesson about writing into complexity, about trusting imagery to convey nuance. Reading Judas Goat felt like opening a door. I came out the other side seeing poetry differently — understanding that poems don’t have to answer all of the conflicts they pose. Sometimes it’s better they don’t.
