Haley Hodges’ poetry collection, Eros Rex, is a thrilling début. The poems are taut and packed full of palpable anguish and passion. The work has a visible top line that tells of carnal and spiritual hunger, and a rewarding undercurrent that points to a divine life, sometimes parallel and sometimes counterpoint to the melody. Composed of some 30 poems, the book moves breezily between lyrics of devotion, poems of commonplace, and poems of biblical engagement. The poet’s desire runs through her daily life, her reading, her theological thought, her body and her mind, and the reader is invited to go with her.
I am kind of a prude. Despite being a feminist thinker and priest who is deeply committed to a strong theology of embodiment as part of the Incarnation, I don’t like talking about sex. So I knew Eros Rex was going to challenge me. The cover, the title, the first poem set me up as a reader to encounter Haley’s strong erotic grammar—these are sexy poems. And they are sexy poems that perform a dynamic familiar to Christian women; fueled by deep desire, there is an anxiety that the desire is wrong, that God is somehow both in the desire and perhaps opposed to it. Women in Christianity are often forced into a space where their sexuality is both the only devotional/intellectual terrain they are granted, and its power is also despised. When Christian women write about frustrated or tortured desires and map those desires onto their relationship with God, it feels like a trap; like playing out the only lines available, like accepting the shape of the prison. And Hodges’ poems at first pass seem to play that tune, in which desire is powerful and connected to God, and also dangerous and shameful/ sinful. In which her powerful intellect is only permitted to speak and think with the erotic female body of desire. But then I read the poems again, and again. And I began to see something else emerge from these multiple muscled lyrics.
I’m going to focus on two poems, “Eros Rex” and “Drifting,” that illustrate some of the currents of thought at play in the book, because Hodges’ work requires close reading. The first half of Eros Rex reads
Lord, we all carry
your world, wait
with its weight, which makes
a world in us, bores
holes in us, creates
a hole-world—better
I guess, than void, than
none—but
I want to have my fill, to have
my fun. I want my fullness.
Instead, I’m carrying
your chasm.
Some things that stand out: with elegant phrase and sound pattern, the speaker of the poem is clearly a mother, and therefore also one who knows sexual encounter. Carrying the world, weighted by it, creates [in us] a world—all these signal maternity in partnership with the creative life force. The anxiety is that this world also bores us as it tires us and bores us as it bores into us, and the speaker only grudgingly admits, “I guess” this is better than void, but the ambivalence is felt. It’s followed up with a ‘girls just want to have fun’ sentiment— “I want my fullness.” In this line, I hear the pathos of the container women are forced into; permitted sex when it bears a child-world, and better than nothing (I guess) but somehow feel like less-than, somehow feels like a loss. “But.” The poem accepts the facts of life with a challenge: “But, I want to have my fill.” She asserts a desire for something more than what is offered, she dreams of a fullness not yet known but known enough to desire. And this is in counterpoint to the setup- “I want my fullness/ Instead, I’m carrying/ your chasm.” She wants a huge fullness and instead is carrying (maternal again) an absence. And as Anne Carson spells out in “Eros the Bittersweet,” absence and lack and chasm are precisely what activate erotic power and desire. So in these brief phrases Hodges speaks of sexual desire, maternity, ambivalence, and hunger for more.
Here’s the second half of the poem:
Instead, I’m carrying
your chasm.
Come climax
Christ, come Eros Rex,
psyche’s ecstasy, spasm
of the panting soul and opener
of the shut.
Enter my dark welkin,
fill, fulfill. Glut.
The sexuality of the stanza is almost Teresa of Avila- it’s breathtaking (and, for a reader like me, even a little uncomfortable — I said I was a prude!) But in its sexual climax, the fullness she seeks is found in the carrying of the Christ-chasm. “Dark welkin,” dark vault of heaven, calls to mind the orthodox term for Mary Platytera, “she whose womb contained what the heavens could not contain.” The desire of this poet is not only for physical orgasm, but for an expansion of the self into something so vast its fullness can only look to us like a chasm, like deep space, like the shape of the universe, the cosmos that is within, and whose ecstatic name is Christ. I’m not feeling trapped anymore, are you? This is rightfully the title poem, and an example of how there is a melody which seems to play the song of the trap of women in Christianity and sexual desire but in fact radically springs us from that trap into cosmic fullness and emptiness. And all with these tight, taut phrases that turn and sound good. “Eros Rex” is the title poem because it opens up the issues with which the poet is entangled, sings the melodic phrases that become the fugue of the book.
“Drifting” takes up this notion of a vastness that is deeply desired and contains that note of worry, or counterpoint, to a simple standard Christian devotional grammar. Is the poet’s sexual, intellectual, spiritual desire for God on the map of acceptable piety? Or is she “asking the wrong sea—” and must “unmap?” In this poem, the poet’s desire is bound up with reading and writing, an ars poetica of sorts. It reads:
The message bobbing, battered
in a bottle on the sea of God, my cries
sunk in the salt of the divine. Brine
to brine I greet you Lord, assaulted
by your vastness, tendered
on your tender waves that toss
my glass to shore. O that you
would read me! Again I wade
into the deep of you, cast anew
my hidden heart. Unchart
to unmap, it floats. This light plays
on holy water and my sight.
Am I asking the wrong sea—
are you the message drifting
through the dark ocean of me?
Let’s start here with the sounds and the rhymes; “bobbing, battered in a bottle-” the sounds are ocean rhythm. Hear “divine. Brine/ to brine,” and “hidden heart. Unchart.” The rhymes across line breaks and without predictable pattern add to the sense of the soundscape of the ocean waters on the shore. I hear the faint echo of the conditioned misogynist erotic in the “assaulted/ tendered” pairing. I forgive it (or accept it) for the poet asserts it is vastness of God, overwhelming, that is perhaps a kind of non-malicious violence to our small scale. Unchart to unmap gives us, I think, the permission again to notice that the poet is both trying to live within acceptable devotional pattern and wondering if she/ we might need to unchart and unmap to see the true landscape of God, to truly engage the ocean, we may need to move beyond what we think we know. The writing and reading throughline situates the whole drama of eros and desire and aspiration within the framework of the text itself (thus ars poetica): the message bobbing, the poet’s writing, message to an unknown desired reader, the Unknown God. “O that you/ would read me!” But then the poem turns and wonders is it the poet writing, or in fact the Divine writing the message and she the ground, she the reader that God desires?
Haley Hodges is a powerful intellect. Her erotic intelligence is of one substance with her perceptive and persistent hunger for God. Make no mistake, these poems are wrestling with the given narrative of women in Christianity, the Christ we have been taught to pray to. They reach for a true Christ; they know what they are seeking, they know the King (Rex) who is for this poet, and perhaps for us as her readers, the Almighty Word himself. The book rewards repeat reading, close reading. In my own reading, at first I only heard the melodies. As I went back again and again, the lines opened and sang in layered harmony and skillful dissonance, music for the soul’s expansion.
Eros Rex by Haley Hodges was published by Orison Books in 2026
Rita Powell holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and currently serves as the Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard. Her work in poetry and performance art explores deep knowledge of body and land in the tradition of Christian ritual and philosophy.