“There’s this layering—like rings in a tree—building up.”
GABRIELLE BATES
Interviewed By: Natalie Tombasco
Okay. Yeah, [the recording] is happening.
God, it’s terrifying to be interviewed, especially verbally and over the phone. I feel so much pressure to be smarter and more interesting than I am in these situations, which is just a compounding of how I feel all the time. I’m always wishing I were smarter, more interesting, and had a better memory.
I feel that in a billion ways.
I was thinking this morning about how tedious that is—that relentless want to be more. In general, I try not to shame myself for my desires, but this particular kind of desire just feels so… insipid, like this insipid drag, and such a waste of time. I don’t know if you can relate to this. Surely tons of people feel this way, but I don’t often talk about it.
Yes, I get that. It’s like you spend a decade writing poems, and then someone’s like, "So, what did you think about this huge aspect?" You try to condense it all into a three-minute soundbite. It’s a difficult task.
Yeah, yeah. I’m genuinely so excited and honored to have the chance to talk with you, though. Your poems have such playful sonics and bite to them that I still think about them all the time, and I just love your mind.
Ah, thank you—the sonic bite is why I return to your poems over and over. You know, it’s funny to hear you say that being interviewed is intimidating, especially since you are a co-host for The Poet Salon. Something that I love about that forum is how you create a ritual cocktail or mocktail for each interview. If you could concoct one for your own interview, what would you call it? What are the ingredients?
I actually designed a Judas Goat cocktail for the pre-release launch party here in Seattle. It was a take on a Black Manhattan. It had bourbon, as an homage to the wintertime—when the book was coming out—and also Southernness. Charred cedar and currant bitters for a foresty feel. There are a lot of cedars in Judas Goat. Oh, and a really dark, brandied cherry that felt visceral and sensual. It was a strong drink. It got people a little messed up, I think.
That sounds delicious. I may try to recreate that tonight, but I need to forage for cedar first.
Oh my gosh, please do! Report back, send me a picture.
Would you be willing to set the scene for me where you are? Like, tell me where you’re speaking from, what’s around you a little bit?
Well, I just moved to Tampa a year ago. And we just moved again a few weeks ago, actually, to a suburb on the city’s outskirts. But I’m in a new house—it’s very echoey and bare—and I’m surrounded by boxes. Outside the window, there are elephant ears and saw palmetto. I’m trying to keep all the plants alive and the ants at bay.
I’m also dealing with an ant infestation.
Oh god, yeah, they are so busy! They had this whole thing going on inside this miniature Japanese garden sculpture. The Temple of Ants, I called it. This morning, a baby lizard was hiding under a couch pillow. In Florida, nature always creeps inside. I confess, I only had one of your “Little Lamb” broadsides nearby. I hope it’s okay that I used it to save the lizard.
Wow, that pleases me immensely. Thank you for telling me that.
What about you?
I’m outside on the porch of my home in the south end of Seattle. The big volcano is off to my right, covered in clouds currently, but I know it’s there. I like knowing it’s there, even when I can’t see it. There’s a wind here today that feels significant, and it’s flapping the umbrella around above me every once in a while. Autumn is coming.
I miss autumn’s yellow leaves so much! Getting into Judas Goat, one of the main explorations is the nonhuman world in relation to the human, which I found to be sort of reminiscent of Donika Kelly’s Bestiary. Animals feel mythical, medieval, similar to the parables of scripture or folklore. I wonder if you’ve ever explored The Aberdeen Bestiary, a twelfth-century text that illustrates and describes animals not with scientific accuracy, but imaginatively, humorously, and didactically. Animals in your work—livestock, reptiles, amphibians, pets—all hold immense symbolic value; they serve as a tool to mirror back human problems. Where did this curiosity begin?
I think our subjects choose us, but I can speculate that it’s rooted in childhood influences and interests. Just a couple of days ago, I was at a concert at the zoo with a friend. That was reminding me of when I was a little kid, begging to go to zoo camp. I fantasized about animals all the time, living among them—I read lots of books about them. I love the idea of a “bestiary,” but that’s not actually a kind of text that I’ve spent much time with myself. Is it an illuminated manuscript?
I believe so. You can search for an animal and consider it symbolically. I’m fascinated by this Judas Goat figure and how your interest stemmed from Natalie Diaz’s essay on the Judas Horse. The idea of betrayal is embodied in the goat with its little “neck-bell jingling,” leading us to “our ends.” My mind is swarming with words: ignorance, atonement, salvation, domestication, husbandry, (dis)obedience. The book’s epigraph is a quote by Linda Gregg: “The body goes into such raptures of obedience.” Why were these themes, this particular animal, aspects you needed to write about?
I’m fascinated and haunted by the layers there, particularly the intersection of ignorance and culpability. To what extent can an animal betray if it’s been trained and doesn’t know what it’s doing? That idea, as a young person who was trying so hard to be studious and good and do what I was told, was confusing. I was grappling with my own ignorance. Those types of animals that humans call Judas, swooped in as a site of inquiry.
Domesticated animals and girlhood and goodness….
These intersections of femininity and religion can really do a number on a young person. That’s definitely related to my draw towards domestication and wildness. Growing up, I contorted into something untrue to me, but I felt like I hadn’t developed the muscles necessary to determine my own sense of what might be truer, if that makes sense.
Right, right. This debut is a coming-of-age narrative, wrestling with leaving and returning to your hometown. It’s also been described as Southern Gothic, as seen in the cemeteries, swamp lilies, stone pews, effigies, kudzu, Mamuna, and the “Spanish statue of the falling angel” of your “Dear Birmingham.” You’ve spoken about your desire to “expunge [your] accent,” and that now, speaking like your family back home, feels artificial. Your poem “Strawberries” is a portrait of the American South rallying around another religion and ritual: college football. The “liquidine, firm, gleaming” cheerleaders dance on the sidelines, and boys use red paint to spell out “PATRIOTS” in celebration of the hypermasculinity and violence of game day. There are also the homoerotic undertones with the boys undressing behind the bleachers. The girls in “silver leotards” feel secondary and unfulfilled in this whole charade.
(Laughing) Yes, well, the South gets such a bad rap. It’s rife with caricature and stereotype, and as a writer moving out of the South and writing back towards it, I was wary of contributing additional unflattering portrayals. The Southern Gothic looms large as a psychic underbelly of my home, my poetics. I could get rid of my physical accent, but I couldn’t get rid of that Southern Gothic influence, its atmosphere, and attention to the twisted, the dark. Anything I wrote—anything that had any life to it—had that imprint. Places as rendered in poems are not one-to-one matches, obviously. They’re viewed through this weird, warped window version, revealing a psychological truth of that place. When I lived in the South, I didn’t know how to articulate or interrogate my fear. I was consumed by it in gendered ways, absolutely, in the performance of a “Christian good girl.” It was constricting, painful. The sexual dynamics and interpersonal dynamics between girls and boys—girls and men—terrified me. I lived in a state of hypervigilance. The larger context around “Strawberries” holds violence against the intimate and the mundane. There’s a military armory down the street from the high school, and people partake in these unspoken, warlike rituals of football games.
Yes, your look at Alabama from an “intimate distance—” the gladiatorial sports and gender dynamics—sort of recalls James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” where the wives are “Dying for love.”
It made sense to have football enter, since the book is dedicated to “the image.” Alabama football is definitely a spectacle.
You went to Auburn, right? Were you involved in sororities at all?
No, that was not for me. Like football, I was surrounded by it—huge crowds of young women in their white, initiation dresses. It made my skin crawl, to be honest. If you did it, no offense… (laughs)
No, same. When I was attending school in Tallahassee, I was like, "What is happening?" During pledge week, there was this sundress and balayage army running from one Greek Revival house to another, and then I went down a #RushTok rabbithole and discovered all the OOTDs, dance trends, Golden Goose…. I ask because BamaRush is the epicenter of American Greek life, where conservative, cool-girl-next-door types have this aggressive drive for sisterhood. There’s the performance of wealth and a high femme aesthetics, and a legacy of white supremacy. It’s odd, truly, and I imagine, pretty stifling.
It was grotesque to witness, and yet so mundane. The surveillance and secret society elements freaked me out, too. The ways the mothers and grandmothers of the girls hold sway and power within the organization. I had friends who did it, and for them it seemed meaningful, a source of joy and structure, but to me, the whole thing seemed pretty disturbing and bleak.
So bleak! Thinking about secret spaces, for many poets, the lure of the genre is that it offers an intermission from the external world, or as you’ve noted, “an intense interior realm.” I love how it’s likened to the domestic, a space where the reader’s a guest. This idea is inherent in the genre, with structure in mind, and how the “stanza” is seen as a “lyric dwelling place.” I’m interested in hearing more of your notions of “home” and poetic interiority, especially alongside a recurring influence of yours, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. How do you see architecture, consciousness, and poetry all coming together for you?
Bachelard’s prose, even though it still boggles me a lot of the time, holds this mix of strangeness and grandiosity that really sparks for me. He makes these big, wild claims—lots of aphoristic statements like “Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones,” and I’ll be like, "Huh?" I’m haunted by his idea that the first house we’ve lived in is physically inscribed in us, as seen in the lines from my poem “Effigy:” “What the self forms around / cannot be undone.” One’s first house is the building they lived in as a baby, sure, but it’s also just early childhood in general. What surrounds us as our consciousness comes into being becomes part of an inextricable interior. It’s not fixed, necessarily, but maybe it’s the sturdiest element we’ll ever experience when it comes to a self. The fixedness of that structure has a gravitational pull for me when writing, because I’m grasping for something tangible. My favorites are the “Nests” and “Shells” chapters in The Poetics of Space. There’s a line, “We want to see and yet, we are afraid to see….” That push/pull of fear and desire, the feared and desired image, encapsulates so much of my poetics.
I love that idea, but terrified by the childhood home being rooted in consciousness, too. In your poem, “Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate,” it’s a cold space, pipes are cracking…. Your work enacts a balance of poetic temperatures as you handle the scorched heat of ferocious and traumatic subject matter while seeking what Kim Addonizio calls a “necessary coldness—”
Ooh, I love that.
I think it suggests a prioritization of objectivity, precision, and most importantly, formal and emotional restraint. Your poem, “Garden,” ends on this idea of confusing the word "cold for clean," which made me think of structure as “tidying up” and the gendered labor of home spaces, how women are often tasked with finding organization in disorder. I’m always reminded of Sylvia Plath’s obsessively neat quatrains and tercets in this way. Are there any writers who were instructive to you on temperature or neatness?
Attaching this to Bachelard and the architectural spaces that poems build, I feel my poems are more worlds than houses, in that there’s a sense of weather and expanse. There are countless houses in the world of a poem, some of which the reader enters or could, some of which the reader doesn’t enter or can’t, but can sense, in the dark, or over some ridge. Coldness feels related to that because there’s a degree of exposure—no walls to protect you. I’m a poet of the nighttime, so there’s this sense of approaching dawn when I write. Dawn is the coldest time. The time when the sun has been gone from a landscape the longest. Like many poets, I’m chasing heat in language. When a poem is approaching its compositional end, it feels as if I’m losing that stream I’m swimming in. The body grows cold. There’s no heat left to chase.
It was neat to observe your revision process play out in Midst in the poem “Ownership.”
That Midst time lapse software is fascinating, right?
Yeah, it’d be instructive for students to witness how messy poems can become as your move through the drafting process. You begin with a relatively smooth recount of a memory of J, some description of a deer, and then the writing becomes more—I’m not sure if this is the right word—but manic. I’m having a visual of Edward Scissorhands shaping hedges.
(Laughing) I love that.
A pruning—another connection to domestic neatness. In writing, you search for alternate words, titles, an organic form, the specificity of the car not being parked on any old intersection but on “College and Magnolia.” This place, whether real or imagined, transports us temporally and spatially to being a college student in the American South.
It’s real, that intersection.
There was this decision, which might feel minuscule, of your back-and-forth ordering in the words “saved or punished.” It seems like ending the line on “punished” felt like the only right answer within the world of Judas Goat. It was like you unlocked the subject of the poem halfway in when thinking of the ethical or honorable reasons for writing this elegy, landing on the line, “I have trouble dwelling in what’s mine,” and that’s where the idea of “Ownership” really takes center stage.
It was a scary invitation to accept, that invitation from Midst, to have the composition recorded. Seeing how that poem mutated and progressed was interesting to me as well. I do have these crazed scissors just snipping, snipping, snipping. I love letting something go—to feel energy flare in its space. Every time I make a change in revision, I copy-paste the whole new version and put it at the top, so there’s this layering—like rings in a tree—building up. I find that comforting, the enduring presence of the previous versions, and knowing that I could always go back, although I rarely do.
Formally, I found “Mothers” and “East Washington Diptych” to be similar in that they have these meditative inquiries and long-winded threads braided together to make sense of the disorderliness of life: “The poem must be a mess because we love each other.” I believe you explained the split or structural chiasmus as “hinged, bi-valvey.” I’d love if you could share thoughts on the construction of these two poems that stand as two pillars at the doors of Judas Goat.
They do have a spiritual kindredness, don’t they? Well, “Mothers” started out as an essay when I felt this big gap in the book around mothers. I needed to dig in explicitly—in prose—to unpack certain maternal relationships, parasocial, biological, etc. There was a short writing residency at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, which is a drive and ferry ride from Seattle, that provided a container of days where I could really dive in and do that work. Ultimately, my editor at Tin House asked how wedded I was to the piece as an essay and suggested revisiting it as a poem. She was so right. It wasn’t in the right form yet, but it was doing important, load-bearing work in the manuscript. There were many iterations over time, but I knew it needed to come at that penultimate moment in the book where the speaker is straining towards the edges of her preoccupations. Drafting in prose was my way of trying to challenge myself to articulate things as clearly, thoroughly, and plain-spokenly as I could possibly bear.
That’s true. A genre shift, a change in container, can sort of carry that heaviness away. In thinking about parasocial relationships and literary mothers, you’ve mentioned Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Carl Phillips, Jorie Graham, and C. D. Wright as some of your strongest poetic influences. You wrote a gorgeous essay for a recent issue of West Branch on Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “earthy and ethereal” collection, Song, which you’ve noted as a primary guide to your poetics. What was it like engaging with Song, with a more critical eye for that project, and was there something one of the other contributors wrote that offered a new perspective or deepened your understanding of a text you read countless times?
Receiving that invitation to engage, in a craft essay form, with Song—a book I’ve read and felt through so many times—was intimidating, but so special. I learned and noticed new things about it, for sure.
There’s this moment in the poem “Song” where there’s a rupture of the short sentences growing longer, a syntactic transformation corresponding with the central image of the heart being pulled out of the body, and the long sentence ends on a moment of iambic pentameter I’d never noticed before: “...and the familiar perch from which it trills.”
Oh, wow.
Right? Iambic pentameter, the “most familiar perch” in English verse, and so often affiliated with the heartbeat—it’s just perfect. I was nerding out so hard. I’d never noticed it. That’s what I love about poetry in general: these great poems you can reread and reread, and they will yield new delights.
Yeah, it was incredible how Shara Lessley’s introduction for the West Branch folio points to the subtle pattern-making and sonic threads.
The sonics and repetitions in that book! I find it all so beguiling, so incessant—almost a clear pattern, but not quite. Organic in its chiming, it resists a regular, mathematical pattern you can track, but it’s regular at the same time. When I’m in the poems, they feel so much like spells. Then I exit the poem, and it almost evaporates, and I’m like, "What just happened? What was that?"
I had that same feeling reading your new swan-obsessed poems, “New Baroque Derangement” and “Ice Swan, Summer Wedding,” for example, the rich lines: “There were spirals, spirals at the heart / as pure lasso—ice pure loss / skipping liquid, straight to air / I could and couldn’t bare / because I was and wasn’t.”
Oh, thank you. I do feel my relationship to music and poetry has been shifting, growing louder. I’ve been channeling the vortex of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet and Alice Notley’s incantatory modes. I’ve been inviting these women in to haunt me differently. Letting sound lead has a soothing quality that I’ve needed in the wake of publishing Judas Goat—the raw nerve vulnerability of a first book. I’m in a phase now of singing to myself.
Interview Posted: December 16, 2025
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