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• Raye Hendrix named breakthrough Alabama poet

Breakthrough Alabama poet Raye Hendrix '14, '17 asks 'What Good is Heaven' in debut collection

Poet and two-time English alum Raye Hendrix has been recognized as a luminary Southern voice by their debut collection’s publisher for their unflinching verse on violence and love.

"What Good is Heaven" was named the Texas Review Press' Alabama selection for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series. In the collection, Hendrix writes from their experience growing up as a queer woman in a small Alabama farm town.

Hendrix wrote the first poem of the book in an introduction to poetry course at Auburn, where they began to study Southern poets.

"The trajectory started at Auburn with this idea that I could write into my experience," Hendrix said. "I didn't have to write these universal poems about life and love. I could actually write about all these little Alabama towns that I grew up in. Once I figured that out at Auburn, that's where I just started going with all my poems, and they eventually coalesced into the book."

"What Good is Heaven" takes readers through a coming-of-age story through the lens of someone navigating the hardship of agricultural life and oppressive cultural expectations.

Hendrix, a Pinson, Alabama, native, drew on their own upbringing to map how brutality, mercy and gender connect and clash against a deep Southern landscape.

"I hope it finds its way to people who need to read it," Hendrix said. "I'm bisexual, and I grew up in a very rural area of Alabama trying to navigate those identities in a place that wasn't always kind to me, but more than that, I just didn't even have the language for it. I didn't know what I was feeling, what I was experiencing, any of that. I want other young, rural, queer kids to feel seen."

"Colorfast" author and Lanier Endowed Professor of English Rose McLarney said, "Hendrix is a new voice in the lineage of Southern writers who have made art of both their homeplace's beauties and horrors."

Fellow English alumna and "Judas Goat" author Gabrielle Bates '13 calls the volume "utterly transporting, drenched in both the dazzling and the disastrous." Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones describes Hendrix's collection as "fresh, surprising, revelatory and ferociously open."

"What Good is Heaven" interrogates themes of identity, mercy, religion and rural living. Hendrix draws parallels between violence on the farm and violence against the body while navigating the complicated relationship between the personal, political and religious landscape of "home."

Hendrix said poetry lends itself to self-reflection through its format, and hopes the collection encourages readers to confront questions about the darker side of values like mercy.

"A poem is very crystalline. Poetry has a way of getting to the feelings, the truth at the heart of things, without a lot of extra language," Hendrix said. "I love reading prose, but poetry has a sort of kinetic energy to it with line breaks. It changes meaning for everyone who reads it, and every time you read it, it feels a little bit different."

Hendrix returned to Auburn for the first time in seven years this September to host a reading at Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers. They drove from Knoxville, where they currently serve as a teaching assistant professor in the University of Tennessee's English department, through the same type of weather that inspired their first poem.

During the reading, Hendrix reconnected with former classmates, Southern Humanities Review alumni and local literary figures from the Third Thursday Poetry Series. They said returning to Auburn felt like coming home.

"The first poem that I wrote at Auburn that ended up being in the book was about Hurricane Katrina. Driving down to Auburn in a hurricane kind of re-sparked that feeling of, 'Oh, this is actually where it started,'" Hendrix said. "I got a little teary-eyed a couple times thinking about it, but Auburn really does feel like home to me. I ended up reading that poem that I first wrote, and that was the full-circle moment for me – getting to read this poem and having someone in the audience who had been there when I wrote the first draft was just this kind of borderline indescribable nostalgia and joy."

Buy "What Good is Heaven" by Raye Hendrix from the Texas A&M University Press website.

Tags: English Alumni Arts and Culture