So much of Raye Hendrix’s debut collection, What Good Is Heaven, is about community–or its traces: what we leave behind, what remains in us. Etymologically, the word "community" draws from multiple sources, many of which relate to the concept of the “commons”–in which all persons in a society retain the right to equal access of cultural and natural resources. As a queer Southerner, Hendrix infuses the collection necessarily with poems that allude to harm experienced while immersed in Southern communities–both personally for the speaker, and in reference to the experience of other queer Southerners. As exemplified in the poem “Catalog of Acceptable Violence,” Hendrix’s harrowing dedication to Nicholas Hawkins, a LGBTQIA+ victim of violence, murdered in a state where this is not classified as a hate crime.. But Hendrix does not outright write-off the South, nor do they resort to easy stereotypes; rather, Hendrix approaches the subject open-armed and tenderly, endeavoring to maintain an equal claim to the cultural and natural resources of the South, insisting on a place for queer Southern pride.
I was reminded quite starkly of the necessity of a space for Southern rights to the resources of the South when embracing Hendrix’s collection for the first time, opening the book on September 21, 2024, and reading the book over the course of a week from my parents’ home in Virginia, while on the other end of the state and further south, Hurricane Helene devastated Appalachia. In the wake of frankly, biblical flooding in the Western Carolinas, parts of Tennessee, and Georgia, communities came together to pool resources, lend assistance, and support each other, as FEMA announced a significant budget deficit while the American government continued to ship bombs across oceans to be detonated on other nations’ children, schools, and hospitals. The least “political” people I know were outraged–the effects of Helene as reported by friends and family in the South displayed undeniable proof of the hypocrisy of American political and ideological rhetoric, when compared to the government’s direct action. Local communities were what filled in the gaps in our disaster response policies.
But queer people have always known that. And disabled persons, and members of other marginalized communities. Who saves us, but us? Hendrix’s collection remarks on this explicitly in poems such as “What The Water Left Behind” or “No Angels Here,”’ which both speak to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf states, recalling, of the horrific televised imagery of New Orleans:
[...] a perverted gift shop snapshot:
wrought-iron coral, rooftops islands, brown bay—
a postcard from a large and lonely God.
“Animal Instinct,” another poem placed earlier in the collection, grapples with the difficult experience of learning to recognize harm cloaked in kindness, through the image of the speaker’s attempt to save the life of a newborn squirrel attacked by a dog:
[...] it died a long slow death over days
in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.
How to understand that even care can be
misplaced, excessed, can make of you
a monster. How to know when kindness
means crush instead of heal.
The form of “Animal Instinct,” composed in neat couplets, hammers home this experience of betrayal all the more painfully. The couplet often offers comfort through companionship, rather than the loneliness of single lines, or the claustrophobia of larger stanzas. The couplet has an intimacy.
Nearly half of Hendrix’s poems are composed through these clipped couplets, perhaps also exemplifying the strict, formal, expectations of people in the South to occupy heteronormative, monogamous relationships, set between man and woman. Necessarily, these couplets, and couplings, do not allow space for anything beyond a conservative conception of doubling: there is no space permitted for relationships between men, between women, for the polyamorous, or for gender outside the gender binary. Hendrix combats this through poems which, at their ends, release through emotionally charged and brilliantly imagined callbacks to earlier images–completely turned on their head. As in “Blue Ridge Lookout” which begins:
Days after the forest fires
and the air is still thick enough
to smudge the fogged ridges
with a finger, wipe away
the smoke to reveal rows
of secret mountains, valleys,
hidden flocks of birds born
as if already in flight, windstruck
then, many stanzas later, finishes:
This is how it goes: we burn
The mountains and die
In a world without mountains.
We don’t have any clue
How to make a bird.
Hendrix’s devotion–or restriction–to this held form throughout so much of the collection makes it all the more astounding when the form shatters, or at least cracks a bit, as in one of the final poems in the collection, “Pinson.” In “Pinson” the speaker leads with the question:
What will it take to stop thinking
of here as home? I stay, I go, I come
The poem continues again in these couplets, acutely observing a Southern hometown: “street still keepers / of slave owners’ names,” “old money,” “trees felled,” and “holdout Confederates, / each new generation baptized in red.” But, the speaker shifts mid-poem, “there’s jasmine here.” And “light,” “women with curlers in their hair— / unowned and belonging to us all.” Troubled by the confusing dichotomy of this Southern town, the speaker of the poem asks a new question: “... Is it wrong of me to want / this to survive? To die? To leave, / come home, then leave again,” before then splitting from the tight form of the couplet, which, until this poem, holds for all of the twenty-three poems-in-couplets that appear in the collection. “Pinson” is the one poem in couplets that breaks from this form, for one line only at its end, with a liberating, and haunting: “and leave my ghost behind?”
With striking rhetorical aptitude and formal brilliance, Hendrix performs astounding queerings of age-old Southern missives–from the broadly stereotypical to the those borne of specific ancestral knowledge, as from the speaker’s grandparents in “Bloodletting:”
inside, a wild hog hung
upside down from the beams
and bled into a bucket
from a slice to the throat
when I asked my grandfather
why, he said once the hog
was empty
it would be clean
and,
my grandmother
had home remedies
for every ailment, learned
from her mother
and her mother’s mother prior:
whiskey for a fussy infant
snow for frostbitten toes
bloody teeth to cure a queer
when I was sick she fed me
water like the hog:
upside down
And it is indeed in this upside down that Hendrix takes Southern maxims and makes a space within them for queerness, as executed in the final lines of “Bloodletting,” in which the speaker then says to their lover:
I have been waiting
for youto bleed me
with your lovely
open mouth
Or, similarly, in the closing lines of “Bad Fruit,” where, after,
The peaches turned
before I could pick them.
I told them, Fuzzy stars,
I envy you, flesh safe
from my father’s teeth
the poem shifts position, to a place of queer reclamation, in which the speaker can assert:
No—It wasn’t my father’s
teeth that needed fearing.
I ate that rotten fruit
and it was sweet.
Hendrix’s debut collection, What Good Is Heaven, gorgeously translates into poetics the complications of the American South, and allows space for those with complex relationships to the South, and the people in it and from it, to love and be loved by such a culturally charged place. The collection’s title permeates each poem–a beating inquiry, or statement, challenging the reading of every line–is Heaven good? Is Heaven useful? Where is Heaven? Will we be saved? But the collection’s title isn’t necessarily a question, and Hendrix doesn’t necessarily supply an answer. Instead, we are gifted poems which demonstrate the ways in which we can take the rhetoric and ideology which has shaped us, though nevertheless harmed us, and reframe it in liberatory ways in service to our own lives (no matter how far they diverge from the paths of our families or hometowns). What Good Is Heaven draws from a queer and disabled tradition of community, and repurposes this lesson through language, imagery, and form to provide a roadmap for imagining inclusive futures for marginalized groups in the American South.
Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Their poetry is published in The London Magazine, Cream City Review, trampset, The Boiler, and elsewhere, with critical writing forthcoming in The Adroit Journal and Redivider.