"A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix's What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love's complicated gestures."
--Rain Taxi Review of Books

--Jennifer Saunders "Rain Taxi Review of Books"

"The speakers in What Good Is Heaven inhabit those contradictory spaces in Raye Hendrix's riveting depictions of life in the mountains of North Alabama: the beauty and the blood-letting of farming, the community and the alienation of small town life, and the love for and the revulsion of queer youth cultivated inside the church and inside the home. These poems are splendidly crafted, melodious, and candid, and hearten readers to consider and reconsider their own experiences and ideologies inside Appalachia."
--Marianne Worthington

--Marianne Worthington (3/21/2025 12:00:00 AM)
"I've been re-reading Raye Hendrix's poems like I'm listening to Chappell Roan songs. The hunger in this book is unstoppable. Hendrix writes about forbidden desire in a way that's unforgettable, urgent, and burns with you long after you've put the book down. What Good Is Heaven is the kind of book that knocks down walls--whether they be walls put up by society, religion, or walls we've put up inside ourselves."
--Ansel Elkins--Ansel Elkins (3/21/2025 12:00:00 AM)
"Raye Hendrix's What Good Is Heaven 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."
--The Rumpus--Bleah Patterson "The Rumpus" (3/19/2025 12:00:00 AM)

"[What Good Is Heaven] is almost a case study on how to bring knowledge of place into writing--or, still further, how language grows and finds itself through land knowing. The language of these poems possesses a rare granularity, a muscled lyricism, that feels to have been forged (or forced) out of the Southern landscapes--the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines where Hendricks was raised. Yet in Hendrix's work this meticulous engagement of words and land becomes transmuted into an ongoing mapping of how place also forms and shapes human character in ways worthy of our love and also of our despair."
--Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

--Sheila Black "Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature"

"[Hendrix's] 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."
--Sundress Reads

--Joey Gould "Sundress Reads" (3/14/2025 12:00:00 AM)

"No wonder our state's strongest poets, such as Rose McLarney, Adam Vines, and others, have praised [Hendrix's] book--she knows the South as well as any poet writing today. . . . With her quirky eye for detail, Hendrix excels at writing love poems of depth and sincerity--a rare accomplishment for such a young poet."
--Alabama Writers' Forum

--Jason Gordy Walker "Alabama Writers' Forum" (2/26/2025 12:00:00 AM)
"Another stunning debut, Raye Hendrix's What Good Is Heaven follows a young speaker navigating her bisexual identity among the Appalachian foothills. In particular the speaker's experience of growing up in a rural area on a farm forces her to contend early with the question of violence -- witnessing daily violence perpetrated against land and animal, bodily harm against queer bodies begins to feel inherent to the speaker, in that both violences are deemed acceptable by a fierce cisheteropatriarchal country. As deep as water and as soft as grass, these poems 'ask 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.'"
--Autostraddle--Gabrielle Grace Hogan "Autostraddle" (12/25/2024 12:00:00 AM)
". . . [N]othing short of lyrical, blending vivid imagery with poignant, often melancholic reflections. Hendrix employs rich sensory details to create a strong sense of place and atmosphere, using the natural world to mirror the speaker's emotional states. The language is intimate yet expansive, seamlessly moving between personal confessions and broader existential musings, with a rhythm that feels almost musical."
--Bisexual Bookshelf
--Ailey "Bisexual Bookshelf" (7/15/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"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