Overview

Set in a rural agricultural community in north Alabama, deep in the Appalachian foothills, What Good is Heaven interrogates the complicated relationship between violence and love. Viewed through the lens of a young, bisexual woman, the poems in this collection layer a queer coming-of-age narrative with poems of witness to the difficult realities not only of rural and farm life, but of violent cultural norms based around the patriarchal religious beliefs that the region is steeped in. Like the social setting of this place, the landscape, with its dark forests and darker hollers, is a space of turbulence—of ideas butting up against each other—and those in the middle are left to sort out the wreckage. This collection is concerned with navigating that wreckage, which predominantly manifests as violence done to bodies. For the speaker of these poems, the bodily harm done to livestock and wild animals, plant life, and even the earth itself as simply part of the justifiable or “acceptable” violence of farm life comes to mirror the mirror the bodily transgression queer folks and women face in her community—violence that is similarly considered to be “acceptable.” In registers that move between the religious, personal, political, and even ecocritical, What Good is Heaven asks what it means to love and be loved by what hurts you, to be implicated in perpetuating the same kinds of harm, and what it means to call such a complicated place your home.

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9781680033717

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Reviews

"""What Good is Heaven offers an extended meditation on mercy, and a tribute--courageous and stunning--to the people and places that raise us. Utterly transporting, drenched in both the dazzling and the disastrous, this remarkable debut conjures an atmospheric and personal South that is deeply queer and kindred, full of animals, hymnals, and heat. In Hendrix's capable hands, one is pulled forward, rapt, through many dangers. I fell into the world of these poems with my senses awakened, heart beating fast. This book, and the survival at its heart, will become a part of you."" --Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023)--Gabrielle Bates ""What Good Is Heaven is a collection heavy with blood and labor: 'slow curve / of a mother's spine: riverbank / solid enough to stand.' Raye Hendrix is a poet lighting the daily violence of the deeply gendered south. The interior Hendrix reveals to us is a geography without bystanders, and through complex lyric tenderness we must ask the same questions as the poems' speaker: 'Is it wrong of me to want / this to survive? To die?' In What Good Is Heaven there is a place for all our contradictions of being. The speaker in Hendrix's poems has found a life in dismantling those contradictions that diminish and limit us--making music in their place."" --C. T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) --C. T. Salazar ""An astonishing, knock-out collection of poems. This is what I want most in a book--visceral poems that are acutely alive and wrestling with the world and ourselves. These poems tackle the violence of the Deep South, which is the violence of America, and do not look away. Raye Hendrix writes like a boxer fights--with courage, grit, grace, tenderness, and an unforgettable urgency. This is why we come to poetry in the first place: to feel something, to be changed."" --Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel (Yale Younger Poets Prize 2015)--Ansel Elkins ""Country wisdom informed by authentic, idiosyncratic experiences with family and the natural world, instead of cornpone stereotypes and unreasonable natural history I see in most contemporary 'Southern' writing, anchors Raye Hendrix's What Good Is Heaven. Hendrix knows a shellcracker from a warmouth and a bluegill. She's pulled on the teat of a cow who recently had a stillborn calf and felt that cow's instinct to bend her neck to see what was feeding from her. She's stalked the hen-house bandits and respects the scavengers who clean up the dead. And through these explorations of the natural world, she evokes human pursuits and anxieties concerning religion and identity and lineage and inheritances that are always present as subtle substrata in the poems. Or, perhaps, she's tricked me into believing that she acquired this acumen firsthand because she's listened so closely to the dirt farmers' and old salts' and pea-shellers' stories and accepts the woods and fields and lakes as mentors and foxes the foxes and coyotes the coyotes. Either way, I'm fully enthralled by Hendrix's pinch of the world and her wanderings through it. Hell, she seems like kin."" --Adam Vines, author of Lures (LSU Press, 2022), Out of Speech (LSU Press, 2018), and The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012)--Adam Vines ""Hendrix is a new voice in the lineage of Southern writers who have made art of both their homeplace's beauties and horrors. Yet she does anything but follow that line straight; her vigorous and vibrant language runs and bucks into the spaces between woman and man, love and hate, and near and far, where the scent of jasmine and blood hang together in the air. Hendrix's poems are like the splinter of glass she describes driven into a heel--they'll stay with you. But, rather than pain, the reader of this book experiences the sharpness of bold ideas, the shimmer of sultry imagery, and intimacies it's a kind of earthly blessing to share."" --Rose McLarney, author of Colorfast (Penguin, 2024), Forage (Penguin, 2019), Its Day Being Gone (National Poetry Series winner, Penguin, 2015), and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books, 2012)--Rose McLarney ""Raye Hendrix is an honest poet--her verse is not 'on the pulse, ' it is the pulse. In her stunning debut, What Good Is Heaven, Hendrix writes the brutal beauty of the Alabama wilds and the humans' wildness in it. In poems that are fresh, surprising, revelatory and ferociously open, Hendrix chronicles the bloody slaughter that is family, religion, identity and love--a soup of secrets in the hot, strange South. Hendrix shows the reader the heart of prey while simultaneously reminding us that 'everything needs to eat.' It is a remarkable collection."" --Ashley M. Jones, Alabama Poet Laureate (2022-2026) and author of REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021), dark // thing (Pleiades Press 2018), and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017)--Ashley M. Jones"

Author Information

Raye Hendrix is the author of the chapbooks Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press, 2021) and Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press, 2021). Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and the 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review), they have also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Oregon Humanities Center, and the Juniper Writing Institute. Raye holds a BA and MA from Auburn University, an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the University of Oregon.

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