Sundress Reads: Review of What Good is Heaven

In What Good is Heaven (Texas Review Press, 2024), Raye Hendrix writes at the intersection of love and pain. Their crisp descriptions of Appalachia are unmistakable and accessible. Published in the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series, her poetry describes an American South that anyone who has lived on a farm will recognize and those who have not can appreciate. Hendrix writes with feeling and exactness, weaving them in an intricately nuanced piece of art.

What Good is Heaven calls the reader to “listen” as it starts with a rural holler staple, a rooster crowing. The first poem, “Morning Song,” functions as an ars poetica that introduces the setting and character types. From there, the poem spools out in fragmented couplets. Readers are introduced to a farmer, a doomed old hen, and an advantageous cat. The collection presents social hierarchies and the tension between people/animals that live within those hierarchies. 

The speaker, a queer Southern woman, has a bright eye for detail, an inquisitive voice, and a sneaky sharp moral center. She’s uniquely suited to describing the society that loves her, raises her, and admonishes her softness and queerness. She takes part in its trappings – hunting, going to church, tending animals, hiking – while confronting its social and moral norms. She wrestles with her stature relative to the land, her parents, the church, and “a large and lonely god” (Hendrix 16). Animal husbandry serves as a metaphor for her questioning of the deadly moral tradeoffs of livestock farming:

On the one hand, the old hen in the first poem is slaughtered when she loses her usefulness.  On the other hand, a well-intentioned girl might cause a dying animal more pain by naively assuming she can save it. 

The speaker’s naivete also causes her father pain in “Urushiol.” Hendrix writes: “As a child I filled my hands / with what I thought were weeds” (9). This expert-level enjambment reinforces the age and joi-de-vive of the child in the first line, while narratively setting up how the speaker unwittingly unleashes urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy, on her father, because she is immune to and unaware of it. I see in this the capacity for a well-meaning loved one to cause harm, the unconditional mercy of a father who holds his child after she unintentionally harms him, and intrinsic differences like biology that can affect the results of similar life experiences. Elsewhere, the speaker describes her father’s hardness or his fatal ideas of mercy for lower animals, but at the end of this poem: 

Having mercy for someone who has hurt you holds the same feeling a queer Southern person might feel about the society that raised them. I appreciate how What Good is Heaven shows the fallibility of people next to their capacity for mercy, next to their hurtfulness, next to their own trauma. Hendrix describes humanity as multifaceted. There’s no one truth, rather a series of poems that all feel deeply true. 

Personally, as a queer person from affluent rural Massachusetts who spent a short time on Sundress’s campus in a holler of Southern Appalachia, the sociology in What Good is Heaven feels familiar.  In “The Bats” I hear my father, as he “asks me to be more like / winter        beautiful but hard” (Hendrix 26). Yes. I can pass as a white man in a way Hendrix’s narrator can’t, but I do know what it’s like to have a father who demanded Zionism, patriarchal submission, and a cisnormative lifestyle. 

But whom must we show hardness? Some questions about our childhood, about America, about gender feel unanswerable. The perplexity is the point, and I’ll leave you with Hendrix’s words that resonated with me:  “I’m still the child / I have always been      hidden dark beneath the porch / pretending every nail hole is a star” (Hendrix 108).

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Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review). Their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.