In a literary climate that elevates northern sensibilities, landscapes, and aesthetics—often met with something akin to scorn for the south—Raye Hendrix’s What Good is Heaven (Texas Review Press, 2024) is just the sort of gritty and sprawling examination of a southern coming of age, daughterhood, gender, and queerhood that the literary landscape has long needed. This collection immediately captures readers’ attention with a unique voice that encapsulates what it is to feel at home in a place like the South. Hendrix’s poetry collection directly addresses, demystifies, and subverts toxic and harmful southern stereotypes while also establishing a rich texture of southern life, love, and grief with ruminations on the parts about the South that are difficult for any marginalized body living there to reconcile. Hendrix deftly captures what it is to be someone with lush roots deep within a place that has historically tried so often to reject anyone “other” like a bad organ, and their poems cling, like the humidity, in return, saying that if we love this home then we can, in fact, teach it how to love us back and one day wake up in a better place.
Here, poems feel brave enough to question: they question their elders, they question the nature of god himself, which, if you’re from the south, are two things contrary to our way of life. Much of the poems’ tension lies simultaneously in this questioning and the way that the speaker doesn’t always know the answer but is still risking something by asking. In southern homes and communities, the risk is that by questioning the dominant norms, one will be rejected. And in the tight knit communities of the South, being rejected when status and loyalty are so often intertwined is devastating.
In poems such as “Fishing on Sundays,” our coming-of-age speaker attempts to reconcile pairs of questions that live at odds with one another: questioning themself and their ties to home; questioning what being southern actually means but being wary of harmful and constricting southern sensibilities. Here, the speaker thinks about the men who made her home, made the lake where she likes to swim, and wonders: “why / don’t we sing hymns to them / instead of God.” As if there is something holy about not just the place that the speaker calls home, the place that they feel unquestionably bound to, but also to the people who forged it. She wants to become—not just a passive resident of her home, whether it is the literal house, town, people, communities, or shared stories, but—someone who forges home here too. There’s a bit of envy here, but mostly these forging men become someone to look up to, someone to revere. As if the speaker can only make sense of her home if they can also make it a more hospitable place to become whoever it is they, individually, are coming into.
These poems feel grainy with rich texture, like sinking your hands into the soil, the way it stays between your fingers all day if you don’t scrub your hands clean. This collection is scrubbed clean of nothing, languishing in the tangibility of a southern upbringing, the thick heat of it. Specifically, one of the best examples of this is in Hendrix’s opening poem “Morning Song,” where the reader sees this introduction to the collection through the lyric of a nature poem. It becomes a pastoral turned slant, the poem paying homage to the land but bucks against idealism. The pastoral tradition is repurposed by the speaker’s own grasp on the scene and, in the scene Hendrix has crafted, I’m in awe of the tension and visceral personhood, “with his undulating dirge,” and “her body still pulls to stretch.” These lines have a deep loyalty to the place, to the always questioned and never stable idea of home, but also to the people who make that place feel familiar and welcoming, even if those people are often in direct opposition to who the speaker is becoming. The tension is undeniable in the sections that inspect this, where the Hendrix is constantly asking us how we make two opposing things meet and fuse together into a new, third kind of home. The speaker is constantly confronted with the threat of what might happen if those two things cannot be fused, of what she will lose if she leaves and what else she will lose if she stays. Hendrix writes a poem that is both distinct and familiar to those who also share these cultural and regional ties. Through the specificity of these places and these people, Hendrix makes universal what might be considered a niche upbringing—because how many of us haven’t felt at home in our homes? How many of us have fought for relationships that pushed us away? Growing up as a queer body, as a girl, in the South is often like one of those relationships, except with the very clay-like dirt we sink our feet into.
Beyond queerness, this collection features poems that delve deeply into gender; they examines how the speaker adheres to expected femininity but feels this place she calls home as something inherently masculine. In poems such as “Squash Garden,” we see the deification of the father in all of his outdoorsy strength and his miraculously inherited ease; there is the impression that the speaker feels the opposite of this. Like an outsider, they’re plagued with never quite knowing how to act.
We get the lines “My father’s body / plowed no sons. He grew a daughter who couldn’t eat the light.” And I think that this tension and dichotomy lives throughout the poem. What does it mean to be a daughter? To be a woman born to a man? How do women admire their fathers in a way that means “I want to become you one day,” rather than “I want to marry you one day”? These questions permeate and intrigue the reader as we traverse the speaker’s coming of age. It is certainly true that this coming of age, while specific to the speaker’s upbringing, can ring familiarity for many readers as well. Anyone who has felt outside of a home they were meant to belong to or struggles to reconcile what they love about a place with what rejects them.
One of my favorite confrontations of gender in the collection can be found in “Doves in the Ivy,” where Hendrix—in a poem that spans two pages of paired couplets, with sharp enjambment that makes the lines hit even harder—ends the poem with: “I wanted to be a southern / man. To love a southern woman. / Feel guilt for nothing.” There’s a deep feeling of yearning throughout this poem, but this solidifies it in a gut punch. In the South, these wants feel incompatible, and we are asked yet again, “how much do I have to give up to belong to the place where I was born?” in a way that is urgent, sometimes frantic, and utterly haunting as it builds from one poem to the next.
Earlier in the poem, we see another nod to either gender’s perceived setbacks or a reference to the speaker’s own relationship to their disabilities—another theme throughout the collection—in the lines “despite my body’s / other failings.” Regardless of length, each of the poems we traverse in this vibrant collection, from the micro to those spanning pages, feels both necessary and sufficient. We aren’t left needing more information, we aren’t left bored, each new line explodes and expands our understanding of the speaker’s journey and allows us to inhabit it as our own.
The emphasis on earth in this collection, a closeness to nature, additionally speaks to Hendrix’s desire to write a speaker who is growing parallel to the earth around them. This invites us into the world of a speaker who is not just from this home but who grew from it as much as the tree or the whippoorwill, mentioned in the poem “Omen.” In this particular poem, we get stark and beautiful parallels between the earth and the speaker’s own relationships to those closest to her. Sometimes she feels more of the earth than she does of her family, as if she is merely acting as a human daughter, sister, or friend in her community. This feels reflective of the way many queer, disabled, or otherwise marginalized bodies find more solace on the outskirts of their born communities, where they create separate communities of their own that feel more like family than their own.
Many poems in What Good is Heaven also speak about lakes and the ocean, about water as a temptation and as a call, or about sinking into the dirt itself. In “What The Water Left Behind,” we see water as a devastation that leaves the speaker and their family questioning the intentions of God. Why would God create water to act as such a disruption? This poem also sculpts an image of the speaker in their family and, in the context of the entire collection, makes us wonder what kind of disruption—devastation, even—the speaker sees herself as to this family unit. And what does that say about the god that the speaker has been taught created her? Why would He send her to disrupt and devastate her own familial and personal landscape?
In “Letter Never Sent to a Once-Lover on the Coast,” water literally outlines the landscape of the speaker’s queer longing, where Hendrix paints a picture of the emotional situation, its own personal metaphorical landscape, and the water parallel to that of the speaker’s longing for a woman. This starkly contrasts the culture on that very coast, the expectation of straightness and to hone that yearning into something productive and useful. Meanwhile, this is a wholly unproductive poem; it feels lush and pleasurable, sad and full of pining and regret. This poem allows the reader to wallow, to yearn, and to also hope for a future for the speaker where these kinds of feelings do not ever return. Against the backdrop of that shore washing in and out, we’re met with a stark and beautiful objective correlative that leaves a stirring impact on the reader.
It is so rare to see a collection that manages to balance the tenuous nature of nature itself with the complexities of the speaker’s internality and personal relationships. I’ve found that so often, one—nature or the personal—gives way to the other, but Hendrix manages in this collection to weave them together into the complex and compelling fabric of the book. While each individual piece stands strongly on its own, there’s a magic that occurs when one reads them as threads of a larger conversation. Poems about the earth become poems about pain, grief, becoming, and stumbling. Poems about pain, grief, becoming, and stumbling mirror those of the southern soil in the speaker’s mind’s eye even when she is no longer inhabiting it. This tension, this balancing of conceits and themes, makes this collection more gripping and raises the stakes even higher for the reader. There is a lot to lose for the speaker, but the reader can also see that there is so much to gain as the speaker struggles to see it for themselves.
In the poem “Urushiol,” the speaker of the poem (as in many of the poems) acts strongly as a confessional one. The self-aware but heartbreaking confession is run through the metaphor of those first few lines: “As a child I filled my hands / with what I thought were weeds.” Latching onto this metaphor, we can string it through the entire collection, witnessing the combining of common threads that reach for something and finding consolation in holding something that should be removed. Through these poems, the speaker reaches for their truest self, expecting it to be simple but finding something more complicated in its place. In this poem’s case, that looks like finding the speaker’s father—whom they often feel more alike to than any other family member—there in the dirt.
A collection that is broken up in distinct but echoing parts, What Good Is Heaven asks the beautiful and conflicting question of what good is heaven, but also what if our little pieces of heaven are right here where we were born? Each part approaches and negotiates with the reader a new understanding of place and of home. It rearranges our ideas of clichés surrounding home, our stereotypes of southern attitudes, and arranges them in such a way that paints an image of something both darker and softer, something warmer and inviting but also alienating. The tension of the collection is continuously caught up in binaries that must also be adjusted. This coming-of-age story builds upon itself with more realization and more intensity, making its way from girlhood into womanhood—it’s trappings and beauties—and then into all of the intricacies of what it is to grow up “other” in a place that values the loyalty of sameness, values the connection to one’s own ancestral blood. And what does it do to the speaker’s sense of belonging when that very blood is challenged by her desire to grow into herself? Altogether, I found Hendrix’s poems to be an expansive exploration of being othered in the South and of coming out—not with the desire to flee one’s own upbringing but instead to emerge wanting to go back, of wanting to plant something new, wanting to make the land you were born on home again.
