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Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times Book Review 'The Shortlist' pick and a Chicago Review of Books 'must-read' book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere. She has served as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops.
Photo credit: Liesa Cole 2021
A New York Times 'The Shortlist' Pick
A Chicago Review of Books Must-Read
A The Millions Must-Read
A Vulture Most-Anticipated Book of Winter
"Thrillingly bold... unique... rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends."
—Library Journal starred review
“Stunning… nearly impossible to put down…” —Autostraddle
"Elegant... dazzling... faces grim truths and draws hard lines"
—The New York Times Book Review
"Gripping" —The Seattle Times
“A sharp-eyed debut" —Poets & Writers
"A stunner. . . . Haunted, funny, and profound." —Shondaland
"...so sharp it leaves one breathless" —Chicago Review of Books
"A living thing... beautiful and devastating and real"
—The Arkansas International
"The words leap off the page. Bates will be a lasting voice in the modern poetry landscape.” —Debutiful
“…reveals the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior.” —Poetry Foundation
"Haunting" —Alta Journal
"Lives on the blade-edge between forebears Carl Phillips and Brigit Pegeen Kelly—intimate and intoxicated and charged with violence; rooted in scripture, wilderness, home spaces. . . . and the mythic worlds we construct to sustain or drive ourselves." —The Adroit Journal
"Bates fills her debut with intense imagery and surprising truths" —Publishers Weekly
"Bates offers in her poems lessons on how to move forward toward health and safety, and a thriving creative and emotional-spiritual interior, without letting go of who we are and where we came from, painful though it can be to bring ourselves, fully, into the light."
—The Rumpus
"Expansive, sure, and sharp." —Southern Review of Books
“Outstanding... poems that arrive at the level of the senses already in motion, like the back of an animal velvet-warm and writhing beneath the hand.” —Powell’s City of Books
"Remarkable... one of America’s most unique voices."
—The Poetry Question
"Arresting" —New England Review
"I’ve written elsewhere that the border between the sacred and the profane is porous, but Bates’s debut makes me wonder if such a border even exists. [O]riginal... hypnotic" —The Millions
"Brutal and beautiful" —Cunning Folk
"What resonates. . . is that desire to experience a fundamental love, even if it’s illusory." —Washington Independent Review of Books
"Ravishing... refuses to flinch, or cease longing" —Garden & Gun
Buy a signed copy
Praise for Judas Goat
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