One of the most important pillars of girlhood is orbiting your entire personality around the likes of Sylvia Plath and writing your own poetry to deal with the woes of one’s burgeoning sexuality, toxic friendships, and other coming-of-age tragedies. Unfortunately for the eponymous troupe of Yellowjackets, poetry fell to the wayside in their teenage years. In its place was cannibalism and feudal warfare.
So today I seek to right that wrong by assigning the Yellowjackets the poetry book that would fix them (or at the very least, what might help them cope). Just in time for National Poetry Month!
Shauna Shipman: Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates
The term “judas goat” refers to a goat trained specifically to herd sheep or other livestock to slaughter — no better use of this term than as the title of Gabrielle Bates’ spellbinding debut. These poems “wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood,” experiences that are certainly familiar to any of the Yellowjackets. The book itself is deeply haunting, as the speaker contends with a tradition of violences — familial, personal, romantic, environmental — and the guilt that comes with surviving when others may not.
DS Waldman’s review of the book looks at the speaker’s confessions as a means of digging for a future free from violence, and acknowledges that “this collection is haunted by that future, by its possibility, by the chance it may never come.” Shauna comes to mind instantly: the de facto main character, much of what the Yellowjackets go through is shown to us through her perspective. As the seasons progress, it may be harder for viewers to defend Shauna, but it is certain that she informs the Yellowjackets narrative of trauma: how we endure, survive, and even succumb.
Judas Goat is like if Shauna had therapy alongside her journaling.
Read Bates’ poem “The Dog” here.
Van Palmer: Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K Iver
It’s been argued in several Yellowjackets fan circles (sometimes with disdain, sometimes with love) that Van’s story exists solely as an accompaniment to Taissa’s. Whether you agree that that is all her story is, it is true that Van’s hopefulness and strong moral ethics act as foils to Taissa’s cynicism and rationality. And even if her story is told primarily through her relationship to Taissa, that relationship is crucial to understanding the greater reaches of Van and her influence over the overarching YJ storyline.
For this reason, K Iver’s brilliant Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco feels an apt suggestion. Of course, there is the tongue-in-cheek reference to movies, a characterization of Van that lends her some of her whimsy and likability, but the book itself is an ode to the speaker’s old lover, a trans man who dies by suicide. In the collection, the speaker not only elegizes Missy (the name given to the lover), but uses their relationship and his death as a means of better understanding their self in the navigation of their queerness.
Read Iver’s poem “Who Is This Grief For?” here.
Taissa Turner: The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde
When we meet Taissa, she is running for state senator of New Jersey, posing with her wife and son for a campaign photoshoot. She’s regal, presidential, and seems like a woman with her shit together. The first time we meet her as a teenager, though, she badly injures another teammate in an effort to “freeze her out” and improve the team’s chances of winning nationals. Through both scenes, Taissa is presented as a ruthless pursuer of her goals, but also as someone with two very different sides to her (a portent of what’s to come). Taissa’s natural penchant for leadership and pursuit of the rational and logical is often at odds with “Dark Tai,” her alter ego who will do whatever it takes to survive regardless of her moral compass. But the real Tai deep down proves herself to be a woman dedicated to overcoming, and to protecting those around her (even if, like with Van in the adult timeline, it doesn’t always go to plan).
For Taissa, I would recommend Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn. Lorde’s voice is a revolution in and of itself; alongside her poetry, I think Taissa would turn as well to Lorde’s longer works such as Sister Outsider or Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
Read Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival” here.
Misty Quigley: Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party by Chessy Normile
Misty, oh, Misty. My heart goes out to her, but I am also terrified of all that she is capable of. Her kookiness provides a needed levity to a show as dark and twisted as Yellowjackets, but at her root is a lonely girl desperate for belonging and connection — something I can never begrudge her (though I can condemn her methods). For this, I recommend Chessy Normile’s Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party. Fiercely funny with a show-stopping bite, the speaker eases readers in with her humor, then knifes through them with an overwhelming sorrow and anger for the way the world works. It is disarming in the way poetry was always meant to be — and the way Misty always is.
The speaker of this book would help Misty recognize that she is not as alone as she fears (and maybe seeing that would keep her from falling down the rabbit hole of, well, murder).
Read Normile’s poem “And Send a Bird” here.
Natalie Scatorccio: Not Me by Eileen Myles
A complicated character whose story could easily be sidelined into a caricature of a drug addict, Natalie is instead a consistently compelling case study in trauma, and a voice of reason for the group that plays against Shauna’s spiral quite well. Over three seasons, she has been thrust into unexpected roles of leadership for the group: as hunter, as explorer, and this season as leader. Her death at the end of season two follows this pattern, as she sacrifices herself to save Lisa. Her dedication to the protection of others, often at the expense of herself, is a pillar of her character, whether or not she is appreciated for such sacrifices.
I am in love with Natalie (or more specifically, Sophie Thatcher), so picking a book to summarize and encapsulate her has already proven strenuous. I think, though, Natalie’s dry wit, rebel streak, and well-hidden but good heart would be compelled by Eileen Myles’ Not Me. Described as “brilliant, incisive,” Not Me has all that familiar Myles acuity, a sharp tongue and a sharp eye, yet tenderized by the ever-present understanding of humanity as flawed, and therefore ugly, and therefore beautiful. Myles has long been one of my favorite poets, moving me in and out of phases of life like riding a wave — I think Natalie would benefit from their work, too.
Read Myles’ poem “Peanut Butter” here.
Lottie Matthews: Gephyromania by TC Tolbert
Lottie is a complicated figure: Is she a hero or a villain, a victim or a perpetrator? Her perception of the world is similarly complicated: is she suffering from a mental illness, or is she truly psychic and in tune with the mysterious Wilderness? Whatever your feelings on Lottie, her connection to the wilds and to things beyond our immediate, tangible understanding feeds the show’s magnetic, supernatural lilt.
For Lottie, I would recommend TC Tolbert’s Gephyromania: a stunning collection, whose title refers to an obsession with bridges. While Tolbert’s intention is to uncover the tumultuous relationship one can have with their body post-transition, it also serves as a messianic text of understanding the self. Of bridging who you were into who you are, whatever pain comes with such introspection. Lottie’s character is one of bridges: between her stuffy upbringing and life in the woods, between the Wilderness and reality, between life before and after rescue. Lottie is a character searching for those bridges and struggling to cross them; I think Tolbert’s work would serve as welcome guidance.
Read Tolbert’s poem “Beg Approval” here.
Jackie Taylor: Feed by Tommy Pico
Did I pick this just for the pun? Pretty much. But the book itself is so much more.
Fourth in an unofficial tetralogy, Feed is a book-length masterpiece of the speaker trawling through the High Line in New York City. The book is a meditation on these gardens at first, then quickly zooms out its lens to ruminate upon loneliness and absence, on what it means to lose and to love and to lose again. Pico’s speaker has Jackie’s magnetic charisma, as well as her romantic notions about the world despite her better judgement. The book reads in a stream-of-consciousness, or like a long voice note/text message from a dear friend relaying their day in fragments as they come to mind. It is at once accessibly casual and compellingly intimate. Like Jackie, despite the sense of authority that comes from the speaker, there is, at the end of the day, a tenderness that can just as easily make you jealous as awed (and hungry for more).
