Worth Burning
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A searing portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boy's journey from a turbulent Southern childhood--marked by parental abuse, death, and hidden queerness--through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past. Worth Burning crackles with the heat of a burn barrel. With a novelist's attention to character and narrative trajectory, Mickie Kennedy glides through four decades beginning with the random hit-and-run that kills the young speaker's father. The mother's mourning curdles, grief becomes addiction, and addiction becomes abuse--emotional, physical, and sexual--as mother and son persist, locked in a monstrously confused togetherness further complicated by the speaker's hidden gayness, in a small Southern town. Through searing confession and stark image-making, Kennedy excavates the contours of a life that persistently bends, against all odds, toward a ramshackle wholeness. Suffused with efficient, image-rich narrative poems, Kennedy's debut is at once sweeping and intimate, like a love note passed in secret.
Black Lawrence Press
Worth Burning
$17.95
Sale price
$17.95
Regular price
Ready to ship in 3 - 5 days
Book Details
- Publisher:
- Black Lawrence Press
- ISBN:
- 9781625571816
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Pages:
- 98
- Authors:
- Mickie Kennedy
- Published Date:
- 2026-02-24
- Language:
- English
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About Mickie Kennedy
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Worth Burning (Black Lawrence Press) Mickie Kennedy. It's rare I enjoy a book this much. Kennedy's voice pulled me in from page one. The stakes are high in these poems and the craft of each pushed me forward into the next. Kennedy lays out the facts candidly, with skill and beauty. There's a thoughtful narrative arc to the collection. It reminds me a bit of Dorianne Laux's work, her first collection in particular (Facts About the Moon) for the perfection of each poem, bravery in response to abuse, and the triumph of the speaker to alchemize pain into meaning. Through Kennedy, we see the AIDS epidemic, a compromise of life choices, flashbacks to coming-of-age, and a progression toward happiness. In the final poem, Kennedy seems to have found it -- "Aubade Where Nobody Leaves" -- in which his husband's blissfully asleep beside him: "Today I am not a ten-year-old boy / hiding from his mother. / I walk the crushed gravel of my driveway". And yes, this suburb still has secrets, but in this moment, our main man's doing well. He's arrived. (If you like this book, check out his 2024 chapbook Glandscapes from Button Poetry, 2024).