Gabrielle Bates for Judas Goat

We are so excited to be hosting the Scottish launch of Gabrielle Bates' debut poetry collection, Judas Goat. The conversation will be chaired by beloved Edinburgh-based poet, Alycia Pirmohamed.

Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love. 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.

In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.

Gabrielle Bates is an American writer from the Deep South, currently living in the Pacific Northwest, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, Kenyon Review, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, AMBIT, and elsewhere, and her debut collection of poems, Judas Goat, published in the U.S. by Tin House Books, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry and named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit. You can find her online at www.gabriellebat.es or on a train reading John Berger. IG: @gabrielle_bates_

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water. Her other works include Hinge, Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative work, Second Memory, which was co-authored by Pratyusha. Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics, and she is the recipient of several awards including a Pushcart Prize, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.