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Seeing Poetry in the Dark: Night Logic & Haunting Images with Gabrielle Bates
Friday, April 28
6-7:15 PM ET
virtual event; open to the public and all mentees & mentors
When the world is quiet and dark, what do you see? In the dark of the night, what feels true?
Come explore the surreal, lyrical poetry of Gabrielle Bates as we celebrate her electric debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House). Gabrielle will share her personal and professional journey as a poet, read her poems, and discuss how “night logic” can be activated on the page to create strange, dark, and haunting progressions of imagery.
We’ll use prompts to create poems together, engaging in associative thinking to animate images in increasingly surprising ways.
Join us for a creatively charged evening to inspire your inner poet.
Meet the Teaching Artist
Gabrielle Bates
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House), praised by the New York Times Book Review and named by the Chicago Review of Books as a must-read book of 2023. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, the Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and elsewhere. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches through a variety of literary organizations, museums, and universities. You can find her online at www.gabriellebat.es, on Twitter (@GabrielleBates), and on Instagram (@gabrielle_bates_).
About Judas Goat…
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.
This event is open to:
all mentees, all mentors and the public
